Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction
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In 1990 the new and very slick Magnetic Windows interpreter was released along with the company's Wonderland, which was based on Lewis Carroll's Alice books. The interpreter was essentially a cross-platform windowing system crafted particularly for text-and-graphics interactive fiction. Three works (Guild fThieves, Corruption, and Fish!) were then ported to run in the new interpreter and released in 1991 as The Magnetic Scrolls Collection Volume 1. But the costly development of the new interpreter did not pay off in the waning market for interactive fiction of the early 1990s, and the company had scrolled to the bottom by 1992 without publishing another volume of this collection, or any other work.
Although this book has only sought to cover English-language IF works, interactive fiction is a phenomenon that has reached most all computer-using countries. Many works were created during the commercial era in languages other than English. A handfirl of English-language works were translated by the companies that made them-Infocom even had Jeff O'Neill begin a German translation of Zork I, which was never completed-but the nature of world software markets made such translations unappealing from a business standpoint. Brian Howarth's Gremlins, written in Scott Adams's system and published in 1984 by Adventure Soft UK, was translated to Spanish and sold in Spain. Few there had access to Infocom's works (as was the case in the United Kingdom), but English-language interactive fiction for the Sinclair Spectrum and Amstrad, such as that by Level 9, was fairly popular in Spain (Jan 1996a).
Interactive fiction companies in non-English-speaking countries were also founded; Aventuras AD in Spain, founded by Juan J. Munoz, is one example. Today, numerous Spanish interactive fiction clubs exist. The Club de Aventuras AD (CARD), which grew from Aventuras AD, is one of the most prominent (Jan 1996b), along with the Sociedad para la Preservacion de las Aventuras Conversacionales (SPAC), which has a purpose similar to the English-language Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games (SPAG) founded earlier by G. Kevin Wilson. Although the Interactive Fiction Archive was founded as an English-language resource (originally hosted in Germany), today it hosts works in Dutch, Esperanto, Italian, German, Spanish, and Swedish-and these include only those works that are available for free-either works authored by individuals or allowed by companies to circulate for free. English-language articles on the history of Italian, German, and Spanish interactive fiction will appear in an upcoming anthology (Short 2004).
Legend Entertainment was perhaps the last 1980s-style commercial interactive fiction company, selling boxed software on store shelves alongside other computer entertainment offerings. It was founded by Bob Bates (the last person to become an Infocom Implementor) and Mike Verdu in 1989. All of Legend's interactive fiction featured graphics, although some worksnamely, the Spellcasting trilogy-could be traversed with the graphics turned off. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls (1990), Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance (1991), and Spellcasting 301: Spring Break (1992) feature a college for wizards complete with curvaceous coeds (lovingly depicted on the package) and fraternity hazing. Infocom Implementor Steven Meretzky, whose IF experience included spellcasting (Sorcerer) and lowbrow sexual corniness (Leather Goddesses of Phobos), designed these works. One aficionado of Legend's interactive fiction described the first of this series as "not quite as mature as Porky's Revenge" and "not Gravity's Rainbow, but it's fun" (Marsh 1999).At least there were some interesting puzzles provided by these and the other Legend titles, such as Bates's more serious Timequest (1991) and the even less serious IF parody Eric the Unready (1993). At any rate, the shelves of Babbage's, Egghead Software, and Electronics Boutique had no other new interactive fiction to offer in the early 1990s, so there would have been little point in complaining. As of 2003, Legend is still in business, but its last piece of interactive fiction was published in 1993. This was Gateway II: Homeworld, a follow-up to the 1992 Frederik Pohl's Gateway and the last piece of interactive fiction to be commercially published for the usual game market (Granade 2002).
While that was the end of one sort of interactive fiction company, others have attempted to sell interactive fiction in different ways. David Baggett and David Leary started a company called Adventions in 1991 to offer "commercial quality text adventures"; they called their Unnkulian Unventure Series "Interactive Fiction for the 90's" (Baggett 1993). Their first two works were distributed as shareware; for a registration fee of $10 each, the customer would also get a map and hints. Former Infocom Implementor Michael Berlyn and his wife Muffy Berlyn founded a company in 1998 to sell boxed interactive fiction in the style of the 1980s. The venture, Cascade Mountain Publishing, published G. Kevin Wilson's Once and Future (which had long been in progress under the name Avalon) that year and then brought out an updated version of Michael Berlyn's Dr. Dumont's Wild PA. R. T.I. After a few years in which no new works were brought out, and in which a promised book edition of the Inform Designer's Manual failed to arrive-years that left some people in the IF community even more wary of commercial ventures (Cadre 2000)-Cascade Mountain Publishing closed its Web site early in 2000. Reportedly, 300 copies of Once and Future were sold (leaving 1,500 in the warehouse) and only 60 copies of the later release Dr. Dumont's Wild P.A.R. TI. were sold (Granade 2001a). A few individuals have since sought to sell their IF works, and the occasional company like Activision has rereleased older works. The main market for interactive fiction today, however, is on eBay and other auction sites, where packaged disks from the 1980s are bought and sold by collectors and IF enthusiasts. Fortunately, the end of the interactive fiction market is not the end of the story for the form.
The adventure game has been called a "remarkable, short-lived genre" (Aarseth 1997, 101). If commercial success were all that determined the life of a genre, it would be correct to declare that interactive fiction's brief life is over. But if one were to accept that way of defining an art form's lifespan, poetry, hypertext fiction, and short film would never have existed at all, since none of these achieved real commercial viability at any point. In the specific case of all-text adventure games and other sorts of interactive fiction, it is the mass popularity brought on by profitability and the presence of interactive fiction on software store shelves that has been exhausted. Interactive fiction itself certainly lives on. After the companies that produced IF works shut down or shifted their focus, as Edward Rothstein (1998) noted, "in a world beneath the thriving universe of video-game commerce, these text adventures thrived. In fact, they are still being written and are far different from the more precious experiments in participatory fiction that ask the reader to use hyperlinks." Interactive fiction has been passionately authored over the past two decades, with a surge of new works being released in recent years.
The still-growing community of interactive fiction authors first really began to demonstrate the vitality of the form in the 1990s, innovating in ways that early hackers and later game companies did not. Their IF works are usually even more widely available today than were the most successful commercial software of the 1980s, since they are typically free for download and, thanks to the Internet, available worldwide. These new pieces of interactive fiction have been created in an array of genres, with different amounts of time required for the typical traversal, and starting from widely varying conceptual and thematic points. A relevant FAQ notes that "interactive fiction [from the independent era] quite regularly achieves respectable rankings on the `Internet PC Games Charts' ... there were five interactive fiction games in the 1996 Year-end Download Top 40, the highest romping in at #12 (beating Doom), making these games some of the most popular non-commercial computer games in the world" (Glasser 2000). In fact the perspective of today's active community of IF authors and interactors is that interactive fiction didn't really get going until after the commercial era. Stephen Granade's timeline of interactive fiction's history (2002), for instance, in an odd reversal ofAarseth's idea of interactive fiction, places about two-thirds of its events after 1991.
This era of independently created interactive fiction
is the current one, so the innovative works of interactive fiction that are to come, at least in the immediate future, are likely to be from the authors discussed here or from other members of the community who are most familiar with these works. These independent IF works themselves and online reviews of many such works are freely available. The works can be found at the Interactive Fiction Archive,
While the current community of IF authors dates from around 1993, individuals and hobbyists began programming interactive fiction much earlier. From the very beginning, Adventure and its imitators were programmed by hobbyists, not for commercial gain. Adventure has been described as folk art (Buckles 1985), although the esoteric skills and expensive computing hardware required for early interactive fiction authorship prevented sophisticated authorship from becoming popular in a broader context.
The source code to this early interactive fiction was often closely guarded, not because authors were fervent about protecting their intellectual property but simply as a practical matter, to make cheating more difficult. This changed in the home computer era, during the 1980s, when magazines offered listings of interactive fiction written in BASIC. The listing of Lance Micklus's Dog StarAdventure, possibly the first of these, was published in May 1979 (Nelson 2001b, 46). Commercial programs were sometimes published in this way, as happened in December 1980 with Scott Adams's Pirate Adventure. It was also not unheard of for the authors of BASIC games, originally published in magazines, to go on to create more complex commercial interactive fiction; this was the case with Brian Moriarty, who became an Infocom Implementor.
Computer program listings of this sort served two main purposes. First, they helped educate the owners of home computers about programming. Programs provided an education in debugging, if nothing else, since the typist would inevitably introduce errors and need to correct them and since the program listings very often had errors in them to begin with. But beyond that, there was some idea that the workings of a program would be easier to understand after one typed it in, line by line. Second, the program so entered was supposed to be either useful or fun. Interestingly, in the case of a work of interactive fiction, these two goals were in fairly direct conflict. Either the program was obscured and incomprehensible-and thus of no educational value, not to mention practically impossible to debug-or else one would learn all about the IF world and its workings as one typed the program in, leaving nothing to be discovered as one interacted. Nevertheless, many BASIC adventure games found their way into print, and numerous books were published on IF programming (DaCosta 1982;Tyler and Howarth 1983;Vile 1984; Menick 1984; Horn 1984). Different editions were sometimes printed of the same book for the different BASIC dialects of 1980s home computers. As this author knows, it is not the most pleasant programming experience to implement interactive fiction in BASIC, but programmers have created text adventures under far less hospitable programming conditions-in, for instance, WordPerfect macros (McComb 1990, chap. 17) and obfuscated C (Noll et al. 2002).
Some special-purpose interactive fiction development systems were used by the ordinary home computer owner of the 1980s. An important early one was Donald Brown's 1980 freeware system Eamon, a system for creating text-based role-playing games; these are primitive interactive fictions that only accept one- or two-word input from a limited set of commands, all of which could be listed. Eamon was used to create more than 240 games; these ranged from works based (without authorization) on The Empire Strikes Back to educational games to a satirical samurai adventure rife with Eamon in-jokes. Several IF development systems were sold alongside games on store shelves, in keeping with the do-it-yourself spirit of the times that led many to learn how to program in BASIC and to purchase creative software like Electronic Arts' Music Construction Kit or Broderbund's Dazzle Draw. Foremost among the IF systems was The Quill by GraemeYeandle (1983), which ran on the Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro, and Commodore 64. Not only was this system popular with hobbyists, but more than sixty commercial works of interactive fiction developed with The Quill were released during the mid-1980s (Nelson 2001, 46). The Quill, as with many IF works developed in the United Kingdom, was hardly known at all in the United States. Another system released in the British market, the 1986 Graphic Adventure Creator by Sean Ellis, proved to be a capable system for creating text-and-graphics interactive fiction. (The Quill could also be used to create works with graphics; add-ons were available to expand its capabilities.) The numerous other systems, with varying capabilities and targeted toward different sorts of users of varying ages and ability levels, included the 1984 Adventure Master by Christopher Chance (Persson 1994). Computer game construction kits of many other sorts existed, too, including the Bard's Tale Construction Kit, HURD (developed by Level 9, which was also a prolific publisher of interactive fiction), Adventure Construction Set (actually for creating maze games), and various arcade-style games that came with "level editors," such as Floppy and Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory.
An important early shareware system for PCs was the Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS) by Mark J. Welch, first released in 1985. An enhanced version, with improvements made by David Malmberg, was released in 1987; it was called the Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) (Welch 1997).This system was later ported to the Atari ST and the Amiga; a version for early Macintoshes was also available. From 1987 to 1992 Softworks spon sored the Annual AGT Adventure Game Writing Contest, held on the Gamer's Forum in CompuServe (Malmberg 1994). As one writer noted, "AGT did very well in the thriving BBS community of the day, particularly [on] the early online services like CompuServe, GEnie and Delphi" (Guy 2001) . One AGT work was Judith Pintar's CosmoServe: An Adventure Game for the BBS-Enslaved, which pokes fun at CompuServe's online culture and at some points mimics a DOS command-line interface. Using the interface, the interactor has to sift through the contents of a simulated hard disk. CosmoServe won the 1992 AGT contest. Some AGT works were available on late-1980s bulletin board systems for online play, making them accessible even to those who didn't download and install them or who used computers that didn't run AGT works. As of this writing, more than eighty AGT works are available on the Interactive Fiction Archive. While this system provided only a two-word parser and had other limitations that were seen as irksome in the 1990s, it was written for a platform that survived through that decade, which wasn't the case with many early systems for home computers. Because of this and because it was effective enough for the purposes of many authors, it remained somewhat popular into the 1990s. Printed AGT manuals were advertised for sale on the Web after 2000, and one AGT entry even appeared in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition.
Of the interactive fiction development systems in wide use today, the one with the longest lineage is The Text Adventure Development System (TADS); the first version was offered by its creator, Michael Roberts, as shareware in 1987 and was, like AGT (which was released that same year), frequently distributed through bulletin board systems. One TADS aficionado writes that "Mike Roberts and his business partner Steve McAdam eventually set up a small dialup BBS in Palo Alto, California, where High Energy, the company they formed to sell TADS as shareware, was based" (Guy 2001). TADS was upgraded to version 2 in November 1992.The new version used virtual memory to allow much larger works to be created, exceeding Infocom's in terms of their file size and the complexity of their IF worlds. But even with the
first version, according to Neil Guy (2001),
it was possible for even a hobbyist to sit down and write a near Infocom-quality game-you didn't need a minicomputer and vast budget to do it. You just needed a copy ofTADS, with its excellent parser, totally object-oriented internal structure and extensive documentation. And just as Infocom's games had been distributed on a wide variety of OS architectures, TADS was ported to the most common OSs of the day-MS-DOS, Macintosh, Atari, UNIX.
From the beginning TADS featured a C-like syntax; it was an objectoriented language with classes and inheritance. The objects that encapsulate data and methods correspond to things in the IF world-their states and the ways one might interact with them.
At the beginning of the 1990s the important forum for IF discussion was neither on the proprietary CompuServe nor on some email list or Web bulletin board. Rather, it was on Usenet, where two newsgroups had been formed for discussing the playing of interactive fiction (rec. games.int-fiction, or rgif) and the creation of it (rec.arts.int-fiction, or raif). Postings to rgif were made as early as 1991, and raif was founded in 1987, although when Adam Engst created raif in 1987 he did so for the discussion of hypertext fiction (Cole 1998). By 1993 both groups were hosting a great deal of discussion, which included programming tips, requests for hints, and commentary on things like Graham Nelson's (1993) proposed "Bill of Player's Rights."These newsgroups (together known as r*if) have continued to be centers for the discussion of interactive fiction. An important complement to the newsgroups in these early days of the Web was the resource mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Interactive Fiction Archive. It was originally hosted at the German National Research Center for Information Technology and maintained byVolker Blasius, beginning in 1992.Those who posted to and read the newsgroups, enjoying the interactive fiction that the regulars made available on the Interactive Fiction Archive, came to refer to themselves as the "IF community," a term that seems to have been used first in the newsgroups in 1994 (Hale-Evans 1994).