My Interest in Interactive Fiction

I am a longtime fan of interactive fiction games. The first game that I ever purchased with my own money for my family's Apple IIe was Zork I. On a career day in 6th grade I dressed up in a button-down shirt and slacks and declared that I wanted to be a text adventure game programmer for Infocom after I graduated from MIT with a software engineering degree. None of that ever really came close to happening, but I played a lot more classic Infocom games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and did attempt to create a text adventure game1 in middle school using a custom text adventure system that my cousin Brian created and shared with me. Unfortunately I never quite got it fully working without crashing, but I'm kind of impressed with my younger self for my concept and my cousin for attempting to create a game making system like that for the Apple IIe even if it's pretty cliche by modern standards 30+ years later.

When I got to college in the early 90s I continued to have an interest in creating text adventure games and eventually latched on to the interactive fiction scene that revolved around rec.arts.int-fiction forum on usenet. I learned about the shareware TADS (Text Adventure Development System for creating text adventures and ordered a copy so I could create the next great text adventure, but never completed anything of note. I also became aware of Graham Nelson's work on Inform 6 at this time and got interested in using a tool that was based on reverse engineering the original Infocom Z-Machine based games I had grown up loving. I definitely wanted to make a text adventure of my own, but never quite enough to make it happen.

Twenty five years later I continue to have an interest in the interactive fiction scene and even subscribe to a couple Text Adventure related podcasts. I'd still like to create some interactive fiction games of my own and potentially enter one in the long running IF Comp. The two most dominant systems these days are Inform 72 and Twine3 and I'd actually like to try my hand at creating games using both systems at some point because they both offer some really cool functionality. As always it remains a matter of time and motivation. I continue to have the interest, but probably not enough focus and time at this point.


  1. My opening premise was you were a character with amnesia who awoke in a dungeon cell where you were imprisoned and had to find a way to escape.

  2. More traditional Infocom style parser based an amazing IDE.

  3. Web and hypertext-centric focused.