Back in the early days of adventure games, there was a hard divide between people who liked text-only adventures — today typically referred to as “interactive fiction”, though if we’re getting technical about it, there are some differences between interactive fiction and text adventures — and those who appreciated games with graphics.

There was a sort of unspoken (well, actually, sometimes spoken) assumption that text-only games were more “grown-up” and for more “intelligent” people, because they specifically required the use of your imagination, just like a good book. And there’s some merit to that argument.

But there were some interesting experiments going on concerning exactly what to do with the graphical capabilities of early ’80s home computers. And Gruds in Space from Sirius Software is a great example.