Racter

Racter is not a game in the usual sense but one of the most talked-about pieces of software from the early home-computer era: a conversation program, or chatterbot, published by Mindscape in 1984. Its name is short for 'raconteur,' and it was famously associated with The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, a book of prose supposedly generated by the program that became a curiosity of early artificial-intelligence marketing. Running Racter, you type sentences and it replies with often surreal, non-sequitur prose that can be eerily evocative or completely nonsensical.

In reality the program leaned heavily on clever templates and randomized substitution rather than any real understanding, and much of the polished book text was curated by its creators William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. That does not diminish its historical importance, though: at a time when most people had never conversed with a computer at all, Racter offered a genuinely strange and memorable experience. Today it plays as a fascinating look at how the public imagined machine intelligence in the mid-1980s, and it still produces the odd sentence that lands with unexpected poetry.