To play some old-fashioned (but fun!) text-based adventure (or “interactive fiction”) games, use Frotz and grab some old data files from your favorite games. My favorite is the Zork series.
If you aren’t sure what a text-based adventure game is, or why you’d want to play one, check out the Brief Introduction to Interactive Fiction.
Installing Frotz
To install Frotz, simply download the .tar.gz file to your linux box (perhaps using wget), issue the command tar -zxvf [name of frotz].tar.gz then run make, then make install as root.
Running Frotz
To play Frotz after it has been installed, use the command frotz then the name of the image (i.e., frotz /etc/games/zork/zork1.dat)
To save the progress of your game, type save while running the game. It will ask for a filename. You can then load the save-state later by using the restore command.
Hours of console-based fun—but watch out for the grues!