"You have been eaten by a grue" and "You are in a maze of twisty little passages" are phrases that haunted me.
I still remember where my love for the genre started. My friend was at the university while his dad (a math teacher) was at a conference there. They set him up on a mainframe terminal and he started playing the classic Adventure. He printed out his game, and brought it back - we must have been no older than 10. As I read through his game, something awakened inside me. A whole world you can explore by typing at a keyboard! Needless to say, the first game my friend and I tried to write was an adventure game. We didn't know how to build a parser, but we knew we could write code like:
Quote:
10 Input response$
20 if response$ = "N" then goto 100
30 if response$ = "S" then goto 150
40 if response$ = "E" then goto 200
50 if response$ = "W" then goto 250
100 Print "You are in a crystal cave with light shining from an unknown source..."
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It was pretty exhilarating. And, yes, the first game was exactly as you described: Two doors, left and right. If you typed "left", you went through the left door and a boulder fell on you and you died. If you typed "right", you went through the right door where you were devoured by a monster. The secret was to type "left " (with a space) which would send you to a different path and you won the game. We made our parents play the game to watch them die. It was pretty funny.