From way back in the day, there are two things that need to be on this list. One is Nethack, defining what a top-down dungeon crawler should be... before computer graphics were a thing. The other is Infocom's Zork. You could go back to its progenitor, Adventure, but Zork and its natural language parser is the game that made the genre a breakout. Zork made the text adventure market what it was.

If you get any useful information out of this thread, I'd be interested in it as well. My 6 and 8 year old boys have been directed to some inappropriate Web sites by one of the older boys' friends. I've switched our home network to OpenDNS, but that's not the same thing as true content filtering. The computers are already in a public place, and we've spoken about the sites to avoid. Heck, it was my 8 year old who first brought up the word "inappropriate" in context. But having said all of that, an extra layer of content filtering would make me happier.

Wow. As the husband of a woman who has written a half-dozen novels, I have to say that eldavojohn has not worked with publishing houses. No offense intended, but in my experience (limited to fiction), authors today are expected to do almost everything except for the actual printing, distribution, picking a title, and having a say in the cover art. Promotion, lining up signings, attending (and paying to attend) conventions, etc. are all on the authors' shoulders. Except for the handful of "big bet" novels that a publisher tries in any given year, authors today carry an awful lot of the weight themselves.

...seem even better and forward-thinking than before. If Time Warner wants to lose market share that badly, they're certainly welcome to it....