Amnesia

Thomas M. Disch's Amnesia is a text adventure computer game created by Charles Kreitzberg's Cognetics Corporation, written by award-winning science fiction author Thomas M. Disch, and programmed by Kevin Bentley using the King Edward Adventure game authoring system developed by James Terry. The game was acquired and produced by Don Daglow and published by Electronic Arts (EA) in 1986 for the MS-DOS PC and Apple II systems. A version for Commodore 64 was released in 1987. The game begins as the player's character awakens in a midtown Manhattan hotel room with absolutely no memory. He has no clothes and no money, and doesn't even remember what he looks like. The player soon discovers he is engaged to a woman he cannot remember, a strange man is trying to kill him, and the state of Texas wants him for murder. From here, the player must unravel the events in his life that led him to this point. In addition to being a text adventure, the game's major innovation was simulating life in Manhattan. Disch's model covered every block and street corner south of 110th Street. A hard-copy map of the streets and subways of Manhattan was included in the packaging. Players moved from place to place on foot, and had to reach destinations at the correct time of day to initiate plot developments. Stores opened and closed at the correct times, street lights went on, and other aspects of New York City life were simulated. Almost 4000 separate Manhattan locations, including 650 streets, were part of the game. In this aspect, along with the player's freedom of movement (most of the time), Amnesia can be seen as a forerunner of the sandbox game. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesia_(video_game))