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Sounds like a must-buy! The first text adventure I played was in cartridge form, Pirate Cove on the VIC 20. I was sucked in big time, so much so that I had to force myself to not play text adventures when school was in session.

Ah...VAX. So many memories. The high school I went to offered computer programming specialty courses. Back then (starting in '82) they were using a DEC VAX 11/750 and had a bunch of CRT and typewriter-style terminals connected to it. I remember the summer before I started high school they sent out supply lists so we could buy them before hand. The lists included 8.5" floppy discs and punch cards. Luckily the decision was made right before I started to stop teaching about the whole punch card thing. I think I still have a pack of unpunched punch cards someplace though. Many after school and lunch hours were spent playing Zork, Mines of Moira, and that Star Trek text game. And speaking of text games, remember that Apple II text game, Eamon? If I remember correctly the main "game" was actually just an intro module of sorts that was meant to be a launch point for adventures that would load up via disc. I played that stupid thing dozens of times before I learned it didn't really do anything, you had to load the actual game separately.

I remember playing Star Trek, too. Wikipedia also lists a a "script" version, which I don't recall.

 

Anyway, Stellar Track is the 2600 equivilant of the text version, and I remember hunting high and low for it back-in-the-day. Only Sears carried it, and I don't think it sold well at all. Finally, I manged to find a copy of it, probably sometime around the crash. It's really quite well done, and manages to recapture the feel of the text version very well. A lot of people don't seem to like it though, probably because they're too young to get the whole concept. But it's a great companion piece to Dark Mage.