alt Hacker NewsIt's not NLP and it never was. The parser accepts a language with a specific syntax that just happens to vaguely look like English.
Some practise is required to become fluent in that language. But it's worth it, because it unlocks many amazing text adventures!
Thank you for explaining the joke.
You're quite abjectly wrong, though. Text adventures were heavily advertised, in their illustrious and very brief moment of sunshine, as 'accepting English input' (cf. Maher, The Digital Antiquarian), which by definition constitutes NLP. They were just extremely bad at it, hence their accompaniment by a constant stream of excuses like the one you just made. (You must have had to dust it off first! That one is older than me.)