I played Dungeon, the much larger mainframe version of Zork in 1978. Between me and six other guys it took us nearly a year to finish the game.

At that time, there were no video terminals. There were no monitors (this is high school).

We played Dungeon and Adventure on 17” wide green bar paper terminals, usually a Digital Equipment Corporation DECWriter II or III.

There was no Internet. There was nowhere to go for hints. We simply had to figure everything out.

At that time, these were the first complex computer games. When the Imps created Infocom they made the top ten most popular games until video arrived in classrooms and homes.

There is a fairly active community of hobbyists that still make text games, though evolved away from the brutal puzzles to more balanced narrative and seamless puzzles.

Using Claude I even built my own platform: https://sharpee.net/.

There a thousands of free text games. Check out https://ifdb.org for more.

I too wrote my own platform, in the early 80s, in C++. I didn't use C++ for the user-written code, instead I used a Forth like, implemented in C++. This probably doomed the program, along with my inability to get string literals and vehicles such as boats right. But it was a great intro to C++, and I spent some time writing an easy, story-telling game, based on Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, in it.

Time is never wasted when you are doing something new.