Dallas Quest

Dallas Quest is a 1984 graphic text adventure from Datasoft based on what was then the most famous television series in the world. A licensed adventure game built on a soap opera is a rarity in itself — and exactly the kind of curiosity that makes the eighties worth revisiting.

You play a private investigator hired by Sue Ellen for a delicate job: find a map to hidden oil fields before J.R. can get his hands on it. The reward is two million dollars. You start at Southfork Ranch, poking around the grounds familiar from the show’s opening titles, but the plot soon whisks you off to the South American jungle, which holds a far more varied menu of hazards than you would expect from a TV licence.

The game plays the classic way: each location is described in text above a static picture, and you type commands into a simple parser. The puzzles are mostly object-based — what to pick up, whom to give it to, where to use it — and the tone is refreshingly tongue-in-cheek, with death lurking in many places and often written for laughs. You do not need to know the series, though fans will catch a few knowing winks.

Modern players will wrestle with the habits of the era: the parser understands a limited vocabulary, some actions cannot be undone, and without frequent saving you will not get far. Within its generation, however, this is an above-average adventure with good pacing and decent artwork — and as a meeting of two eighties phenomena, the prime-time soap and the text adventure, it is a period document that will never be repeated.

You can play Dallas Quest on oldgame.cz right in your browser, no emulator setup required.