Haunt, a 1970s text-adventure, is now playable in your browser

The find

A digital ghost has been dragged back into the light. Haunt, a text-adventure game originating in the 1970s, is now playable on a website: https://haunt.madebywindmill.com/. The revival was spotted on Hacker News, where readers pointed to the site and began clicking through the old-school parser and spooky descriptions. It has been reported that the page is hosted by Windmill, though details about the provenance of the files are sparse.

What you get

Open the page and you’re dropped into pure text: no graphics, just a prompt, a room description, and the familiar challenge of "what now?" Fans of Zork and early interactive fiction will feel right at home. Allegedly the release aims to preserve the original experience rather than modernize it — glitches and idiosyncrasies intact — so expect the charming rough edges that make retro games feel alive.

Why it matters

This is about preservation and accessibility as much as nostalgia. Making a 1970s game playable in a browser widens the audience: curious newcomers, retro gamers, and researchers can all poke around without digging up vintage hardware or arcane emulators. Who wouldn’t want to type "go north" into a haunted mansion at 1 a.m. and see what happens? It’s a small, lovely reminder that interactive storytelling didn’t start with pixels and polygons — it started with imagination, one line of text at a time.

Sources: madebywindmill.com, Hacker News