Anyone remember Thieves Guild or was that 90/91? If it wasn't 2 am here I'd find a link for it but a true classic none the less.

Alter Ego.

Arthur - The Quest for Excalibur - well-written text-based game with nice pictures to accompany the text but no animations and there is also no sound .

The Guild of Thieves? 1987 according to Mobygames and Wikipedia.

I agree with everything that was written up to this point. :-)

Mindshadow was great, so were most Infocom adventures (Zork, The Lurking Horror, etc.) and the Magnetic Scrolls games (that was the company that brought us games like Fish, The Pawn and The Guild of Thieves). The Magnetic Scrolls games also featured graphics but only for illustration.

The games from Legend Entertainment (founded by former Infocom people) were also superb. Eric the Unready, Death Gate, Shannara and Superhero League of Hoboken can not be recommended highly enough. Sadly most of them were overlooked at their time. They were from the 90s and also had graphics to click on but that only served to build sentences from verb lists and objects without having to type.

Shadowgate, Déjà Vu and Uninvited from Mindscape or Tass Times in Tonetown from Interplay were also great games with similar interfaces even though these games are from the 80s.

Sadly GOG doesn't have the Elvira games but they do have Waxworks from Horrorsoft (AKA Adventuresoft). These are also very good games. Watch out though, these games have some very graphic death scenes and are not suited for the squeamish. ;-) Or children.

Some more random games I remember from the 80s: Dallas Quest (this one got rather bad reviews but it was actually fun if you liked the Dallas soap back then), Mask of the Sun, Castle of Terror, The Hobbit, The Saga of Erik the Viking, Murder on the Mississippi.

Honorary mention should go to the SAGA games that got me into adventures. (Yes, king.com, you are not the first ones to use the word saga in connection with computer games!)

SAGA stands for Scott Adams' Grand Adventures and was a series of adventure games by Scott Adams starting from the late 70s. Later renamed to Scott Adams' Graphic Adventures when illustration graphics were added in the 80s. The parser wasn't good at all (only 2 word sentences were allowed) but back then games had to fit into less KB than you have fingers on one hand. ;-) That was even before the C-64 hit the streets.

Later in the 80s Scott Adams also made some more well known adventures with a Marvel license like The Hulk or Spiderman for the C-64. On top of that he is kind enough to make his adventures available as freeware from his webpage.

Some closing notes: Pure text games obviously play the same on any system. But as soon as a game contains graphics I would recommend to look for Amiga or Atari ST versions (or even C-64 versions if the former were not available for older games) and play on an emulator. You don't want to look at EGA (or worse, even CGA) graphics of early to mid 80s PC games. Most games from the 90 usually already have VGA/SVGA graphics.

One of my favourite Adventure games. But then it's one of the few Adventure games I actually finished.

Other Adventure game favourites:
The Hobbit
The Pawn
The Legend of the Sword

And just in case OP isn't aware - GOG do a pack of all the early, text based Zork games (and Planetfall, randomly) here:
http://www.gog.com/game/the_zork_anthology

That's it. Thank you. :D