If you reference XYZZY, you need to suggest Colossal Cave! I think this is the text game that inspired all the others (and the only game I've ever played on VAX/VMS). You may be able to run it with `advent` on Linux. There used to be an Emacs command for it (maybe `M-x adventure`?), but I don't remember it and I can't seem to find it on Google. It looks like there's also a Python version at https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-adventure