Your otherwise fine nostalgia-fest "History of PC Games" feature (PCW April 2008) barely mentioned the text games that were so popular in the early 80s.

Back in the days when graphics cards were unknown, Ram was 640KB, operating systems and applications were loaded by floppy disk, the internet barely existed outside the military and monitors were monochrome and text-only.

Back in 1980, when I was working for a metropolitan authority that shall remain nameless, the playing of text games, particularly Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was endemic amongst us grunt workers  to counter the sheer bureaucratic ennui of our daily existence.

They were gripping, required us to use our imaginations, and were often fiendishly difficult - I still remember with pride being one of only three people to finish Hitchhiker's Guide after what must have been hundreds of hours' of play over a year.

Their best advantage, though, was that because they were text our bosses thought we were beavering away at word processing or data entry, a luxury modern cubefarm drones no longer have in the days of high-quality 3D graphics.

I mourn the demise of text games which, like a good book compared to a multi-million dollar film, require you to use your imagination rather than bludgeoning your senses with whizz-bang special effects. They also ran on the lowest spec PCs, required no graphics cards, needed no motor skills other than typing, and you could learn how to play them in minutes.

I hope that, one day, gamers will return to the technical simplicity but narrative complexity of text games, and that new titles will be produced by writers with imagination. And if this ever happens, I hope and pray that a sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide is one of the first to emerge.

Fred Riley