30 years ago, they were beautiful and innovative. So were Atari games and 14.4k modems. Today they're archaic, on par with rolling a hoop with a stick that was popular 100 years ago. There's a reason text adventures don't break the top charts on the App Store. The point of the article is that this doesn't have to be that way, that text adventures can still be relevant.
If they weren't popular 30 years ago, this article wouldn't be talking about them becoming more modern, so really you're just rewording the entire point of the article.
They weren't "beautiful and innovative" 30 years ago in your sense that they were "modern" then and "archaic" now.
30 years ago they were also "archaic" in technological capability sense.
People played those games well into the era of Amiga and Atari level graphics, and played them for what they were, not because there weren't graphical games available in abundance.
During the Amiga and Atari age, graphical games were possible, but expensive (in time, talent, determination) to create. Text adventures were not. Even though platforms at the time could execute graphical games, the developer overhead in creating them wasn't even close to equivalent.
As graphical games got easier to produce, that gap shrank, and text adventures did get less and less vital.
I played Zork not because I wanted to, but because it's the only game I had that would run on my computer. I dreamed with envy of color monitors and Amigas that I saw in magazines. In the end though I learned English from it-- I distinctly remember "forest" being one of the first words I had to go look up.
Well, according to Wikipedia, Zork was the best selling game of 1982 and continued to increase in sales year over year (selling 150,000 copies in 1984). So it seems like it was pretty popular.
What I mean by archaic is people aren't used to playing text-only games now. They were then, so much that Zork was the best selling computer game. I mean, Minecraft is pretty archaic in terms of technical capability, but it's not archaic as a style of game. It's actually pretty popular, and a lot of people would call it beautiful and innovative.
Hadean is bringing back a long-dead (for over 20 years, again according to Wikipedia) style of game with a modern twist. Text adventures were popular three decades ago, then died out, and this game hopes to bring them back to a modern audience.
If they weren't popular 30 years ago, this article wouldn't be talking about them becoming more modern, so really you're just rewording the entire point of the article.