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As I am an old MUD addict who still do the occational crusades online, I have noticed that the user-base on these things are not declining at any noticable rate. The average age of the players may be higher than in the "golden days" of text adventures, but they still do have a strong following.

FYI: I mostly play on Viking MUD - not the largest of the MUDs, but it's the one I've been hanging around. I also use Frotz - the multiplatform Z-Engine - to play Infocom games on Linux. Not to forget of course, the original text adventure "Adventure" that has always been part of the Slackware Linux distribution, and the unforgettable Foom - a text adventure based on ID Softwares Doom game, using TADS - the Text Adventure Development System.

How pleased I am to see IFComp finally mentioned on Slashdot! I know people in the IF community have been trying to have this happen for at least the past couple of comps. I hope that this will help to not only generate more IF players, but also authors.

One that note: I see folks have mentioned 'em, but nobody has done the service to the truly lazy and linked to 'em, so allow me then then to list off some favorite sophisticated interactive fiction authorship engines:

Inform, based on the parser Infocom used in its games (as of the late 80s), is a fully object-oriented language with a C-like syntax. It's my personal language of choice for the little bit of IF dabbling I've done; you can see the source for a small and silly game called 'Calliope' I wrote for last year's competition (I came in 23rd, heh (but I got to win an Honest Bob CD anyway, hurrah)) linked from my own IF info page(which also has the compiled game, and links to lots of other modern IF games (much better than mine!) and authors I like). Inform is also open-source, and binaries exist for any platform you might reasonably care to name.

There's also TADS and Hugo, about which I know little, but are both popular enough with other authors to be worth checking out for the interested newcomer.

Have fun!
J
MacOS Open Source

The Text Adventure Development System, or TADS as it is known, has been around for probably almost a decade. It compiles text adventures into a binary format that can be run by an interpreter on many platforms, including Linux, Unix, Mac, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, Acorn RISC, and Atari.

I believe either Zork or one of its predecessors can be readily found. The original Adventure as well as many new and interesting ones can be found as well, although I can't say I have played any of them. I found out about TADS back when I wasa interested in creating my own game. The freeware package includes compilers, debuggers and other things for creating your own text adventures.

I don't know anything about the Infocom games, but TADS is very interesting, and I think people should check it out. Source code is available.

JD

No, it is the consoles, with their proprietary technology and strict content controls that don't have much of an indie scene. The content controls on consoles are driven by a few different things:

1. Profits: By controlling every aspect of video game creation, companies like Nintendo and Sony can make killings. Everytime someone makes a game, they get a cut of the profits. I don't think Microsoft weilds that type of power with developers, but if they do it is a relatively new thing.

2. Fear: The attitude of the U.S. Government and certain powerful political lobbies in the U.S. is that videoogaming and gaming in general are evil and should just disappear. Console game companies have come to the conclusion that if they are to continue to exist (in the U.S.), they will have to restrict content, despite the First Amendment. Electronic Arts did this with a game by a company they bought. Their attitude was "We won't produce it but we are going to sit on the rights and prevent anyone else from producing it either."

Oh, I've read Game Over by David Scheff and I think it is an excellent reference for people interested in the industry. An online reference (which I got due to a Slashdot poster on another thread) is The Dot Eaters an online history of console games.

I agree with the article about the consoles niches, Nintendo seeks to appeal to younger kids, and Playstation to older. However, I think that while it is true that among teenage salespeople the Playstation may get support, a far more powerful persuasion was summed up for me by a kids mom in Toys 'R' Us. She said, "Look at all the games for the Playstation, the Nintendo 64 has only a few." For the inexperienced game buyer, more is going to seem like better because they'll figure there are more chances to find a good title.

Oh, and I want to address the 'life' issue brought up by someone in another thread. The fact is, the first responsibility of games is to have an immersive environment where the player feels that they have some control. They tried creating photorealistic games in the past, but these games didn't sell because they were limited to point and click quick decision making. I'm not talking about more impressive stuff like the rotoscoping in Prince of Persia which allowed for fluid life like movement in characters but to games like Night Trap or Fox Hunt which were just badly made movies with limited interactivity.

Personally, I'm not interested in photorealism (as some people are), I'm not sure I'd even like it if it were possible. I like games that feel immersive like System Shock 2 (or on consoles, the much maligned Resident Evil) but this is a personal opinion. If a game will sell in big numbers, someone will try to make it. I just think photorealistic graphics will continue to be a low priority if it continues to mean low player interaction.

Where have all the retail quality text-adventures gone? Remember when the biggest thrill in life was reading your copy of the New Zork Times (until those fascists at the New York Times made them change it to the Status Line) to see what the latest from Infocom was? Of course, my all time favorite text adventure was Enchanter, but it's a close cousin of Zork. Oh well, I guess I'll have to write my own... using TADS! (The Text Adventure Development System) It's really cool!

What a great list! These are great ideas for any kind of "free time" computing project. Does anything like this exist anywhere else on the net?

Take a classic board game and write your own computer version of it. Program "perfect" play for the computer player.

Just remember that there are some games where "perfect" play is very difficult, if not impossible (Go springs to mind, as well as Chess).

Things like Othello and Checkers are do-able though.

Download the Infocom engine and write your own adventure. Write your own MUD or chat program.

Amen! Inform and TADS are great starting points for those aspiring nonlinear writers out there...

The most well-known of these is Inform, a language written to produce bytecode for the Z-Machine, which is the virtual machine that Infocom used for their classic adventures. So, if there's a z-code interpreter available for your machine (which there almost certainly is), you can play all of the old Infocom games and most of the new Interactive Fiction games with it. Inform has some bitmap graphics capability, but few games use it -- most of the ones that do were written by Infocom (Zork Zero, Shogun, Arthur, and Journey).

There's also TADS, the Text Adventure Development System, which is somewhat similar to Inform but not as well known. This might be because it used to be shareware. TADS interpreters are also available on a wide range of systems, but not all of the interpreters handle all of the fancy new TADS features, like styled text, sound, and graphics. HUGO, the system mentioned here, is generally thought of as the third of the big three IF languages -- it's not quite as popular and not quite as ported. It's still a good language, though, and it's great to finally see a Linux port of the environment.