Amnesia

Amnesia is a 1986 text adventure published by Electronic Arts and written by the acclaimed science-fiction author Thomas M. Disch, developed with Cognetics Corporation. Its famous hook is right there in the title: you wake up in a hotel room in Manhattan with no memory of who you are or how you got there, and the game unfolds as you try to reconstruct your identity while a very real danger closes in. It's a literary piece of interactive fiction, reflecting Disch's background as a serious novelist and poet.

The detail people always cite about Amnesia is its ambition in simulating a large chunk of New York City, letting you wander a genuinely sprawling map of Manhattan streets, which was a striking scope for a text game of the mid-80s. My recall of the specific puzzles is partial, so I'll leave those unstated, but the atmosphere of paranoia and disorientation, and the unusual pedigree of a real novelist writing the prose, are what make it stand out. It's remembered more as a fascinating experiment than as a smoothly playable game, and today it's chiefly of interest to students of interactive fiction and of the crossover between literature and early games.