During college in the early 1980s I wrote a never published text adventure called Stowaway to Oblivion. It was written in BASIC on the Apple II and had a very simple verb-noun parser. It was a fun little program, but I've always wanted to revisit that code and do something a little more sophisticated á la Zork.
Sadly I no longer have the source for Stowaway, but when I decided to write a new tutorial for CLIPS I came back to the idea of revisiting text adventures. Although the commercial market collapsed several decades ago, I discovered there's still an active community writing text adventures.
In writing the tutorial, I've been happy with how well suited CLIPS has been for this type of application, but as it turns out there's another declarative programming language called Inform 7 that's specifically designed for writing text adventures. It's pretty cool.
