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Text adventures are still alive these days, but not so much commercial. More like "fan (interactive) fiction". For example: https://ifcomp.org/

So you're ignorant of the great literary IF works, such as those by Emily Short. You really should check out the modern IF scene.
The annual competition is going on right now, and although there's a lot of crap, there's some gold in there too.

... the 2010 IF Competition games have just been posted. Go play them.

Folks should definitely check out that implementation of the z-machine. It's build in story search/downloading is just fantastic. Now everyone download and play "Blue Chairs", "Photopia", and "Spider and Web".

For starters.

The parent is talking about past IF (Interactive Fiction) Competition winners. The IF Competition has been running for more than 10 years and has brought some really impressive pieces of IF to the world's attention. http://www.ifcomp.org/

I really want to see some level of text based gaming come back.

Text gaming didn't leave, it just went indie. Some of the best works since the Infocom days have appeared in the annual rec.arts.int-fiction competition, the 15th of which is in progress now.

Someone below mentioned Photopia, and that's a good place to start (it took first place in the IF competition nine or ten years ago).

It started when I reformatted my drive and started using Linux exclusively and gave up TV about 10 years ago. Up until then, I used to buy games and had game consoles around. I last remember playing Metal Gear Solid like a man obsessed and getting a sound beating or two playing Starcraft online.

On Linux, there were plenty of games - GNU Chess, Same Gnome and so forth. There was no buying any games for Linux at that time, so I learned to like these games a lot. I imagine people must have had a similar experience with Microsoft's Solitaire.

When I got married, my wife needed a Windows machine to access work applications, so we had a Windows machine and I could purchase games again if I were inclined. But, it just didn't occur to me to buy games anymore. I found free games to be more interesting in some respects because they didn't have money for graphics, so they focused more on other things. This isn't knocking professionally created games. In my experience they're great, I just wasn't looking for them at this point.

I tried playing games that won The Interactive Fiction Competition because I remember playing Zork back when I was young. I couldn't get into text adventures anymore, but I think it is worth exploring.

I had played Civilization before too. So, I tried freeciv, which led to other free turn-based games like Battle for Wesnoth and even returning to older games like Nethack.

I then went on to try independent games that you had to pay a small amount for, like those made by Positech.

I also tried Second Life and similar and found them to be glorified IRC chat rooms.

I'm getting into this history because I think it raises an interesting question. Why would anyone buy Halo III when they have never played the the first one? Particularly, if someone can buy the earlier editions for a fraction of their original cost now, and they would likely enjoy them as much as most people did the first time they played them, why not start there?

You may not be as extreme an example as I am, but I bet there are older games, free games or low-priced independent games that you have never played and would like. So, why are you buying the newest WOW expansion set (and paying the subscription fees) or HALO 3 - as soon as it comes out? Is it that you are so involved in these games? I can understand that because the one game I have purchased was Sid Meyer's Pirates - again, partially because I had played it before and liked it a lot. But, I don't want to assume that is true of everyone.

What about a new game? It's one thing to get the new Grand Theft Auto. It's another to get a totally new game. How do you decide to go with something just released - rather than buy something older that you haven't played before? Is it about having the newest and greatest in graphical features? What's the appeal?

Maybe you are such a hard core gamer that you've played most new games. But given the amount of time they require - is this really so? Maybe it is playing with friends, a la Quake. Maybe it's checking the review on Gamespot or Slashdot. Since I don't play them, I don't know. So was wondering if someone can offer a clue.

I guess part of my question is that I am looking at new things to try. I know there are a lot of good games out there that I haven't played. So, why would I be interested in these new models of game production or even new games? What do you suggest? What games do you think everyone should know? Is there a great game out there that you think most gamers have missed?

For example, I remember reading about one game in Slashdot where you are a pencil or something and you role around and things stick to you - something from Japan. I've also heard someone that taught fo

Maybe not many will buy them, but there is a yearly competition for them http://www.ifcomp.org/

I think a few new text adventures are released as shareware every year too (as well as freeware). Of course, they have better parsers than you describe, but so did Infocom games 18 years ago.

Thanks for the insightful comment. Your intelligent remarks restore my confidence in /. I don't know why your post was moderated as funny.

I tried my hand at this by authoring a TADS game and entering it in the annual IF competition. It turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought.

One problem that I ran into was subject verb agreement between what the gaming system provides and what you provide. Another problem was in the combinatorial explosion of the interactive nature of the media. In non-interactive fiction, you know what has already happened in the story so you can reference those things while writing. In interactive fiction, the user may not have navigated to a particular room so you have to be careful when you need to refer to another place or event. I have blogged on this elsewhere.

That's actually already happened, in a way. After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform). That, along with other interactive fiction languages/toolkits that compile to their own VMs (TADS, Hugo, AGT, ALAN, and many more) and a small but dedicated community has ensured that interactive fiction hasn't died out.

Every year dozens of new games come out, usually for the two major annual competitions (the IF Comp and the Spring Thing). Most of them are shorter than "commercial-era" games, mainly because they're written by hobbyists who don't have the time and resources to commit to building large games. They run the gamut from puzzle-focused games in the style of Infocom to story-focused games that eschew large numbers of elaborate puzzles to focus on story, and there are also more experimental and artistic games that try to push the medium in new directions. The IF Archive has an extensive collection of these games, and there are several review sites that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some.

Go to http://ifcomp.org/ for this year's IF competition, if you'd like to judge.

Finishing Myst requires no amount of cleverness. It's learning what you're supposed to be doing in the first place that is the primary challenge of Myst, and most people are understandably not interested in dicking around, which is basically what the game makes you do.

• The spaceship section's maze had to be gone through twice (and slowly). In addition, you don't know the correct procedure for the maze unless you've been through another section.
• The lighthouse telescope turned slowly.
• Another turning thing in the spaceship section was either too slow (eroding paitence) or too fast (causing frustration).

There is actually a fairly large community for games similar to this in the English-speaking world, where it is known as interactive fiction (or by it's old-fashioned name, text adventure). Infocom produced some of the most famous games in this genre, including Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's now a very active community of (mostly) amateurs creating these games just for fun and to explore the artistic possibilities of interactivity in storytelling.

Most interactive fiction these days is purely text based, as that can be easily created by one or two people who have more experience with writing and programming than graphics and multimedia, and doesn't require a large budget or time investment, though you do occasionally see games with graphics. It has become common to write these games to run on a virtual machine, so that they can be run on all kinds of different platforms. The two most common virtual machines are the Z-machine, which has actually been reverse-engineered from Infocom's virtual machine and thus is compatible with most of their old games and tons of old computers, and the TADS VM. Likewise, there are two common authoring environments, which target these machines; Inform targets the Z-machine, and TADS targets, well, the TADS VM. Both have recently released innovative new systems; Inform 7 uses a natural language syntax (similar to the natural language input that controls the game), and TADS 3 is designed to be aggressively object-oriented.

For anyone who is new to these sorts of games, there are a few games that have been designed specifically for beginners. I would recommend Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold or Emily Short's City of Secrets. You can find lots more games, along with capsule reviews of some of them, at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive. In order to play these games, you'll need an interpreter for the virtual machine. On Windows or Unix/Linux I would recommend Gargoyle, as it's an interpreter that has nice typography and supports many different virtual machines. On the Mac, I would recommend either Zoom (for Z-machine, with support for some other interpreters in beta) or Spatterlight (which supports many different machines).

There is also a large community interested in developing, playing, criticizing, and discussing these games. Some of the best places to go for discussion are the interactive fiction newsgroups, rec.arts.int-fiction (for discussion of interactive fiction programming, game design, and topics about the field as a whole) and rec.games.int-fiction (for announcement and discussion of particular games). There is also an interactive fiction MUD (mostly a fancy chat-room), several contests for developing the best interactive fiction, plenty of reviews and other articles online. There are several good beginner's guides to the format as well.

Anyhow, I thought that since this review made it sounds like interactive novels were mostly a Japanese thing, I thought I'd point out a bit of what is available in the English speaking world. As I mentioned, these are mostly text based, both due to the preferences of the authors and lack of budget, unlike the graphical Jap

It's just an interactive fiction title. There's lots of them, but there hasn't been a successful commercial release in over a decade. There are many free ones available though. Check out the IF Archive to see a pretty large selection of them. There is even free software for making them; check out the Inform language / IF development system for creating new games. Plus, there are annual contests to show off your writing talents. Check out both the IF Comp and the Saugus Ghost Story Contest for a couple of examples.

And of course, there's a whole wiki dedicated to interactive fiction, too.

Although it may be somewhat interesting or entertaining to read those reviews, all they seem to do is trash on the game, insulting it. (you expect the next line to start out something intelligent and informative like "yo momma's so fat that...") Very few details, very shallow on the reasons why we should hate the game.

You should check out some more modern games. The form has come a long way in the almost 30 years since Zork.

http://www.brasslantern.org/
http://www.ifcomp.org

Well, a lot of the IF community got into these games back when an 80-column display on a home computer was high tech. The medium has been proclaimed dead as a commercial form, and lives solely due to the efforts of hobbyists, who are (for the most part) writing esoteric, artsy games.

The process of playing the games requires hard thought, and most modern IF is by and for people who've played all the classics of the field. Comparing a modern IF game of the type found in these yearly competitions to most modern computer toys isn't just like sitting down with a book versus watching a movie; it's like deciding to learn Greek while reading Plato, rather than watching this summer's sure-fire action hit. These are games by and for a relatively small and specialized community.

That said, dude, the download page for the competition games tells you what to do, it has a package of interpreters for Windows, it has a link to the best Mac interpreter, it has the games. What more do you want? I've had more hassle figuring out how to play emulated console games than this would be.

Only now are games rated in terms of hours gameplay. And what's considered a good game offers 30 hours. I challenge any youngster to finish, for example, Head Over Heals in that time.

Anyone who wants adventure games should go look. However they are niche market, but the funniest thing is, there's more adventure games out there than games for the NES.

The only thing is you must get an interpreter for them, and there are many of them but they all work perfectly. The main ones are TADS, ADRIFT, and INFORM (infocom engine) but there's at least 10 major interpreters that have been used.

The only other thing is this is a niche field but it's also a free niche market that people constantly contribute too, and in addition they've changed. Adventure style games are now called "interactive Fiction" or simply IF

Please check http://www.ifarchive.org/ http://www.ifcomp.org/ for two sites. There's MANY more. They might not all be amazing, but they are still there, though less graphical than the quest series from sierra.

P.S. Quest for glory is sorely missed.

The 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition winner, Photopia, packs a powerful punch.
http://www.ifcomp.org/comp06/history.html

Inform isn't the only system available for creating IF -- see the rec.arts.int-fiction Authorship FAQ.

On a related note, the Interactive Fiction Competition is apparently still going strong after over a decade, with entries sorted by authoring system.

Don't forget too that there are various interactive fiction contests held annually. I know of at least two that have been running for more than a few years:

• The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition
• The Saugus.net Halloween Contest

There are a few contests out there dedicated to Interactive Fiction, and these contests tend to view it more as a literary form than a style of computer game.

The biggest is of course IF Comp, but there are other smaller ones dedicated to particular themes (like the annual Saugus.net Ghost Story Contest that invite both prose and interactive fiction entries).

Viewing interactive fiction as just a type of computer game is a little like viewing an audio book as just a type of CD. While it's in some sense true, a typical I-F title has just as much in common with a typical computer game as a typical audio book has with a typical pop CD...

I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has mentioned the 11th annual Interactive Fiction Competition going on right now. However, today is the last day to be a judge.

• http://www.tads.org/
• http://brasslantern.org/
• http://www.xyzzynews.com/
• http://www.ifcomp.org/
• http://www.ifarchive.org/

• http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
• http://www.adventuredevelopers.com/

In fact, they don't need graphics at all!

Here I talk about 1st-person "story-oriented" games, not 3rd-person strategy games. How about games taking on more interesting stories? How about NPCs that can actually learn from one-another and generate some semblance of human language on the fly, characters who are not just dumb entities that you click on so they tell you everything they know as some predetermined monologue in some predetermined tone, despite your shooting your gun 5 feet from them. How about games which can generate their own subplots, so the game designers themselves can play their games?

Most games have certainly been quite bland in these arenas, and I don't think it will improve until the games industry starts hiring NLP (and other) specialists to design moderately intelligent systems which allow for more interesting character interaction. Right now the assumption is that putting games online makes them more "interactable," but that mostly makes games open to excessive PKing, cheating, and a distinct lack of role-playing. I'm sure there are some arenas where this isn't so true (personally I've played some on great NWN servers, where the story/role-playing take precedence over the obnoxious "I wanna level every night so I can show my friends I'm better" mentality of so many online gamers.

Anyhoo, perhaps one day NPC character interaction will improve and NPCs will rise up from their servitude and take over! And then we'll be sorry we mercilessly slaughtered them for their key to the crypts (when their relatives come and hunt us down).

Consequences for character actions which the game designers themselves do not even know -- that's a fascinating game feature.

Most of the interpreters you will need are available from the IF Archive. You will need interpreters for TADS 2 and 3, Z-code, Hugo, ALAN, and ADRIFT (for Windows or Mac).

Yeah. How about you try these: http://ifcomp.org/comp04/download.html

Have you played any of the winners of the Interactive Fiction contests?

Or, if you must have pictures, the highly rated adventures designed for Neverwinter Nights?

Probably there are many other examples of low-barrier-to-entry games but these were the first to occur to me. (Both run under Linux, too!)

See this link here: http://www.ifcomp.org/ Also there is this about the IM bots which serve up INFOCOM games. Those can be found here: http://wired.com/news/games/0,2101,62791,00.html

Text adventures (or Interactive Fiction) are here. http://ifarchive.org/, http://ifcomp.org/ and rec.arts.int-fiction & rec.games.int-fiction. Some people have gone the annoying, so-called "puzzleless" route, but there are still good games out there that aren't puzzleless.

Meanwhile, an adventure game doesn't reveal its wonders (or failures) for at least an hour, perhaps more. It is hard to separate out bad games from very very good ones, and I think the market soured as people gave up after too many bad experiences.

Essentially, adventure games have similar problems to literature. You don't need a million dollars and a team of writers to code together a game, and you have such freedom to innovate that there is no easy box-checking to do to determine if what you've written is up to scratch.

The interactive fiction people have really come together to produce detailed game reviews and open competitions (see IFcomp) as a sort of homebrew version of the book-review and annual prizes that help readers cull through the tens of thousands of books each year.

For example, most of the higher-ranking games don't let you mess things up (e.g. by "shattering the crystal key" or whatever) and they let you UNDO actions if you find that you don't like how things are going.

Re-implementing the Z-machine is nothing to be ashamed of. Someone's done it in Perl, and someone else did it as an Emacs major mode... and heck, I'm working on a pure Javascript Z-machine for Mozilla </plug>. There's so much good new Z-machine material coming out each year now that building new Z-machines for modern environments isn't just some sort of digital archaeology to relive the Infocom glory days, though of course there's that side to it as well. It's a living tradition, not a reconstructed dead culture.

rec.arts.int-fiction
rec.games.int-fiction

And there is also the yearly interactive fiction competition. The competition is a fairly big deal in the Interactive Fiction community, as fans submit games, play them, and rate them. 30 games were submitted this year. There are also a number of games, and interpreters that run on everything from Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, and almost anything else you can think of.

Interactive fiction hasn't died, and you can certainly play it on your PDA. Furthermore, it's generally acknowledged that the quality of modern works has surpassed that of Infocom. Baf's guide is probably a good place to dip your toes in, but there's resources all over the place and the annual competition has just finished.

An interactive novel, at least the kind you're probably thinking about with deeply implemented characters and so forth, is probably AI-complete. It's not about the disk space and processor speed, it's about the inherent trickiness.

But noone is making "real" adventures anymore (either of the text type, or in the Sierra/Lucas style),

Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.

Let me reiterate the request to use BitTorrent to ease our bandwith requirements. BitTorrent links are available for all of the games in a zip file, all of the games in a Windows installer, and all of the required interpreters for Windows in an installer.

If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.

Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.

Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.

Let me reiterate the request to use BitTorrent to ease our bandwith requirements. BitTorrent links are available for all of the games in a zip file, all of the games in a Windows installer, and all of the required interpreters for Windows in an installer.

If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.

Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.

Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.

Let me reiterate the request to use BitTorrent to ease our bandwith requirements. BitTorrent links are available for all of the games in a zip file, all of the games in a Windows installer, and all of the required interpreters for Windows in an installer.

If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.

Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.

If you want to download all of the games, you have several choices of files to download.

* For Windows, there are two files which contain everything you need. IFComp2003.exe contains all of the games. WinInterpreters.exe has all of the interpreters, which are the programs you'll need to run the games. They are Windows installers, so you will only need to double-click them once you've downloaded them, and they'll do their thing.

* For the Mac, Comp03.sit contains all of the games which can be run natively under MacOS, and MacInterpreters.sit has all of the interpreters.

* For everyone else, Comp03.zip contains all of the games.

To ease bandwidth requirements, please use the BitTorrent links if at all possible. If you use BitTorrent, when you're done downloading, please leave your download window open for a while, so others can download the files from you.

Most of the interpreters you will need are available from the IF Archive. You will need interpreters for TADS 2 and 3, Z-code, ALAN, AGT, and (if you're running Windows) ADRIFT.

If you want to download all of the games, you have several choices of files to download.

* For Windows, there are two files which contain everything you need. IFComp2003.exe contains all of the games. WinInterpreters.exe has all of the interpreters, which are the programs you'll need to run the games. They are Windows installers, so you will only need to double-click them once you've downloaded them, and they'll do their thing.

* For the Mac, Comp03.sit contains all of the games which can be run natively under MacOS, and MacInterpreters.sit has all of the interpreters.

* For everyone else, Comp03.zip contains all of the games.

To ease bandwidth requirements, please use the BitTorrent links if at all possible. If you use BitTorrent, when you're done downloading, please leave your download window open for a while, so others can download the files from you.

Most of the interpreters you will need are available from the IF Archive. You will need interpreters for TADS 2 and 3, Z-code, ALAN, AGT, and (if you're running Windows) ADRIFT.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

Winners of the past competitions were:

2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.