In order to play Reverberations, you will also need to download an interpreter. I recommend using Frotz.
I've been a big fan of text-based adventure games for a long time, and I finally wrote one of my own in late 1996. The occasion: the second annual iteractive fiction competition. The game: Reverberations, an appallingly silly short "story" about a pizza delivery dweeb turned Rambo.
This little vignette features mafia dons, earthquakes, some of the worst dialogue ever seen in an adventure game, and a fairly side-splitting ending. Reverberations won me a modest prize (a book) for the dubious honor of being 13th place out of 26 games, which was pretty good considering some of the competition and reminding you that it was the first adventure game I wrote. It has been favorably compared to Detective, the game widely reputed to be the worst text game ever written. You'll find it in the "reverb" subdirectory of the contest site, and you can also play some of the other games online. My personal favorite is "Delusions" by Chris Forman.
If you would like to author your own text adventure, you could do a lot worse than to look into the system I used, a language called "Inform", written by Graham Nelson.
":::::gasp::::: GOOD GOD, MAN, YOU CAN EVEN SPELL!"
"It doesn't suck."
"Russell, 'babe' is not a suitably descriptive term for a strong female character."
"It was more like a text version of a bad movie... at least it works."
"Say what you want, but I LIKED this one!"
"It's not as bad as Detective. Really it isn't."