As people already noted, depends what you mean under "text games". There are a bunch of interactive fiction, multiser dungeons, roguelikes. And in Linux/Unix world text games are still going strong.
Some roguelikes Some of them might have also 2D or 3D guis too for those interested.
Angband [url=http://www-math.bgsu.edu/~grabine/moria.html]Moria[/url]
Nethack nlarn UnNetHack Zangband A big list of other roguelikes Another big list of rogulikes Some interactive fiction This genre may include also a graphical interactive fiction. But a lot of them are text based.
I'm not really familiar with the most, but I know some of the classics:
Adventure (1976) (also known as Colossal Cave) (also see BSD games)
(1977) ([url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork#Dungeon]a non-commercial version of Zork)
Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
Zork series (1980, 1981, 1982, etc)
But there are several all time top lists if you are interested:
Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all time (2011) Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all time (2015) A list of resources with the recommended IF game lists from ifwiki
Some IF archives and resources:
Interactive Fiction Archive Interactive Fiction Database Interactive fiction wiki MUDs MUDs (multiuser dungeons) are MMORPGs of the 80s and 90s. :) Although they are still going strong as a niche and mostly parallel to mainstream game industry (most of them are freely available hobby projects, often open source). For a long (and somewhate boring) history of the genre see
Wikipedia page. Interesting thing though (according to the wiki): it seems many of MMORPG developers started as MUD designers.
There are MUD dedicated sites on the net that might be of interest. Some of them are:
MUD Connect Reddit's r/MUD Top MUD sites MUD wiki on Wikia
Curses and other "textual graphics" Under Unix-like OSes there also exist quasy graphical games using Curses (today usually NCurses or BSD curses) terminal libray. There some really nice games using NCurses.
ASCII Invaders Braincurses (a mastermind clone)
[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20140721010215/http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/~hartmann/sweep/screenshot.html]Freesweep[/url] (a Minesweeper game)
MyMan (a Pacman clone)
NCurses Nibbles [url=http://www.catb.org/~esr/bs/]bs[/url] (a game of battleship against the computer)
hinversi (game of Inversi)
netris ninvaders (Space Invaders clone)
npush (a game very similar to Sokoban)
(another snake clone nsudoku (a game of Sudoku)
oldrunner (Loderunner clone)
pacman (another pacman clone)
skifree)
Snake (see BSD games bellow)
Tint (yet another tetris clone)
tty-solitaire (a nice colorfull version of solitaire)
yetris (a tetris clone)
Worm (see BSD games bellow)
And many others. See the following for some lists
Cool ncurses games Command line Game List Games on the Linux console BSD Games This is a package of text based games that come with BSD family of OSes. On Linux it's available under the name "BSD games" (although might not contain all of them). Might be available on Windows via
Cygwin.
I borrowed most of the descriptions from
here Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure)
Arithmetic - an exploration game
atc - quiz on simple arithmetics
backgammon - the game of backgammon
battlestar - a tropical adventure game
canfield - the solitaire card game canfield
cribbage - the card game cribbage
fish - Go Fish
gomoku - 5 in a row
hangman
hunt - a multi-player multi-terminal game
mille - Mille Bornes
monop - Monopoly
phantasia - an inter-terminal fantasy game
quiz - random knowledge tests
robots - fight of villanious robots
sails - multi-user wooden ships and iron men
snake
tetris-bsd - a variant of tetris
trek - trekkie game
worm - another snake
wump - hunt the wumpus in an underground cave (fun!)
Other text games GNU Chess - mostly used as a chess engine that powers GUI based chess clients like Winboard and XBoard, but playable on its own
GNU GO - same as above but for a game of go
