To recreate the bygone days where we had to type in our actions and read text like a printed book if we wanted to play "video games".
Why not? I've always been interested in interactive fiction and I've always wanted to write my own generic text adventure engine. This seemed like a good idea, so one Saturday I started writing. I wanted to make the engine as hacky (read: get it working quickly) as possible, but I found that in doing so I made it easy to add new features.
Before long I had a simple two word parser, room descriptions, items I could pick up and drop and flags. The flags are super simple, but they can make for complex games. The engine is kinda straightfoward and it's the data that makes it complicated.