Hey gang! Excited to be a part of this.  Wondering what people's inspirations are/what got them interested in text adventures? I'm a big Colossal Cave fan. What about the rest of yous? 

For me, it was Scott Adams. The first adventure I played was Adventureland. That got me hooked. Then I gradually worked through his other games and bought every adventure I could get my hands on. Colossal Cave for the Atari 400/800 was one of those. I played a lot of magazine/book type-ins and still have a soft spot for those. I really liked the early illustrated text adventures from Sierra Online (i.e. everything before King's Quest) and all the Apple II games that were ported to the Atari.

I had a ZX Spectrum in the 1980s and got interested (mostly frustrated) in text games at that time. Then forgot about them for 30 years or so, before rediscovering them in the past few years.  They're generally (but not always) a bit less frustrating than they used to be! Nowadays, I write them as one of my hobbies.