![ADVENT -- Crowther Woods](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/ADVENT_--_Crowther_Woods.png)
''
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
simulating environments in which players use text
commands to control
characters
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as
literary
Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to ...
narratives
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narra ...
, either in the form of
interactive narrative
Interactive storytelling (also known as interactive drama) is a form of digital entertainment in which the storyline is not predetermined. The author creates the setting, characters, and situation which the narrative must address, but the user (a ...
s or
interactive narration
Narrative structure is a literary element generally described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to a reader, listener, or viewer. The narrative text structures are the plot and the ...
s. These works can also be understood as a form of
video game
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...
, either in the form of an
adventure game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw ...
or
role-playing game
A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of player character, characters in a fictional Setting (narrative), setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within ...
. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of
adventure game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw ...
where the entire interface can be "
text-only",
however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on
puzzle
A puzzle is a game, Problem solving, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together (Disentanglement puzzle, or take them apart) in a logical way, in order to arrive at th ...
s.
Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time, including
CP/M
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...
(not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems.
The term can also be used to refer to analogue versions of literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as
gamebook
A gamebook is a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices. The narrative branches along various paths, typically through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. Each narrative typically does not ...
s, where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the ''
Choose Your Own Adventure
''Choose Your Own Adventure'' is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actio ...
'' book series, and the collaborative "" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction. The term "interactive fiction" is sometimes used also to refer to
visual novel
A , often abbreviated as VN, is a form of digital semi-interactive fiction. Visual novels are often associated with and used in the medium of video games, but are not always labeled as such themselves. They combine a textual narrative with sta ...
s, a type of
interactive narrative
Interactive storytelling (also known as interactive drama) is a form of digital entertainment in which the storyline is not predetermined. The author creates the setting, characters, and situation which the narrative must address, but the user (a ...
software popular in Japan.
Medium
Text adventures are one of the oldest types of
computer game
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device to gener ...
s and form a subset of the
adventure
An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme spo ...
genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Interactive fiction usually relies on
reading
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of Letter (alphabet), letters, symbols, etc., especially by Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch.
For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process invo ...
from a screen and on
typing
Typing is the process of writing or inputting text by pressing keys on a typewriter, computer keyboard, mobile phone or calculator. It can be distinguished from other means of text input, such as handwriting and speech recognition. Text can b ...
input, although text-to-speech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as
audio game
An audio game is an electronic game played on a device such as a personal computer. It is similar to a video game save that there is audible and tactile feedback but not visual.
Audio games originally started out as 'blind accessible'-games an ...
s.
Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple
sentences such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a
text parser
{{Refimprove, date=August 2007
In adventure games, a text parser takes typed input (a command) from the player and simplifies it to something the game can understand. Usually, words with the same meaning are turned into the same word (e.g. "take" a ...
. Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers, such as those built on ZIL (
Zork Implementation Language
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code ...
), could understand complete sentences.
[DeMaria, Rusel and Wilson, Johnny L. (2002) ''High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games'' McGraw-Hill/Osborne, Berkeley, Calif., p. 52, ] Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as "open the red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today.
Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered.
These games are unique in that they may create an ''illogical space'', where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today's era of 3D gaming,
and the Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary 'puzzles for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced designers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate.
Interactive fiction shares much in common with
Multi-User Dungeons
A MUD (; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain) is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-bas ...
('MUDs'). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that are not possible in a single player environment.
Writing style
Interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing: the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in simple command form (
imperative sentences). A typical command may be:
> PULL Lever
The responses from the game are usually written from a
second-person point of view
Point of view or Points of View may refer to:
Concept and technique
* Point of view (philosophy), an attitude how one sees or thinks of something
* Point of view (literature) or narrative mode, the perspective of the narrative voice; the pronou ...
, in
present tense
The present tense (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present ...
. This is because, unlike in most works of fiction, the main character is closely associated with the player, and the events are seen to be happening as the player plays. While older text adventures often identified the protagonist with the player directly, newer games tend to have specific, well-defined protagonists with separate identities from the player. The classic essay "Crimes Against Mimesis"
[ This is a reformatted version of a set of articles originally posted to Usenet:] discusses, among other IF issues, the nature of "You" in interactive fiction. A typical response might look something like this, the response to "look in tea chest" at the start of ''
Curses
A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, ...
'':
That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and there's nothing there but that boring old book. You pick it up anyway, bored as you are.[ Nelson, Graham '']Curses
A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, ...
'', 1993.
Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour (such as ''
Zork
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and ...
'', ''
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (sometimes referred to as ''HG2G'', ''HHGTTG'', ''H2G2'', or ''tHGttG'') is a comic science fiction, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally The Hitchhiker's Guide to th ...
'', and ''
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
''Leather Goddesses of Phobos'' is an interactive fiction video game written by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom in 1986. It was released for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Macintosh, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, Commodore 6 ...
''), address the player with an informal tone, sometimes including sarcastic remarks (see the transcript from ''Curses'', above, for an example). The late Douglas Adams, in designing the IF version of his 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', created a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game: the game requires the one solitary item that the player ''didn't'' choose at the outset of play.
Some IF works dispense with second-person narrative entirely, opting for a first-person perspective ('I') or even placing the player in the position of an observer, rather than a direct participant. In some 'experimental' IF, the concept of self-identification is eliminated entirely, and the player instead takes the role of an inanimate object, a force of nature, or an abstract concept; experimental IF usually pushes the limits of the concept and challenges many assumptions about the medium.
History
1960s and 70s
Natural language processing
Though neither program was developed as a narrative work, the software programs
ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, E ...
(1964–1966) and
SHRDLU
SHRDLU was an early natural-language understanding computer program, developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In the program, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and querying the st ...
(1968–1970) can formally be considered early examples of interactive fiction, as both programs used
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
to take input from their user and respond in a virtual and conversational manner. ELIZA simulated a psychotherapist that appeared to provide human-like responses to the user's input, while SHRDLU employed an artificial intelligence that could move virtual objects around an environment and respond to questions asked about the environment's shape. The development of effective natural language processing would become an essential part of interactive fiction development.
''Adventure''
Around 1975,
Will Crowther
William Crowther (born 1936) is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and ins ...
, a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, ''
Adventure
An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme spo ...
'' (originally called ''ADVENT'' because a filename could only be six characters long in the
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
he was using, and later named ''Colossal Cave Adventure'').
Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends, he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who talked in full sentences and who understood simple two-word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in
Fortran for the
PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...
. Crowther's original version was an accurate
simulation
A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of Conceptual model, models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or proc ...
of part of the real
Colossal Cave, but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge).
Stanford University graduate student
Don Woods Donald Woods (1933–2001) was a South African journalist and activist.
Donald or Don Woods may also refer to:
* Donald Woods (actor) (1906–1998), Canadian-born American film and television actor
* Donald Devereux Woods (1912–1964), British m ...
discovered ''Adventure'' while working at the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center ...
, and in 1977 obtained and expanded Crowther's source code (with Crowther's permission). Woods's changes were reminiscent of the writings of
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philology, philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''.
From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was ...
, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano some claim is based on
Mount Doom
In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth, Mordor (pronounced ; from Sindarin ''Black Land'' and Quenya ''Land of Shadow'') is the realm and base of the evil Sauron. It lay to the east of Gondor and the great river Anduin, and to ...
, but Woods says was not.
In early 1977, ''Adventure'' spread across
ARPAnet
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
, and has survived on the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
to this day. The game has since been ported to many other
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
s, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...
1.0 OS. ''Adventure'' is a cornerstone of the online IF community; there currently exist dozens of different independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems.
The popularity of ''Adventure'' led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command '
xyzzy', which is now included as an
Easter Egg
Easter eggs, also called Paschal eggs, are eggs that are decorated for the Christian feast of Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. As such, Easter eggs are common during the season of Eastertide (Easter season). The oldest tr ...
in modern games, such as ''
Microsoft Minesweeper
''Microsoft Minesweeper'' (formerly just ''Minesweeper'', and also known as ''Flower Field'') is a minesweeper-type video game created by Curt Johnson, originally for IBM's OS/2, that was ported to Microsoft Windows by Robert Donner, both Micros ...
''.
''Adventure'' was also directly responsible for the founding of Sierra Online (later
Sierra Entertainment
Sierra Entertainment, Inc. (formerly On-Line Systems and Sierra On-Line, Inc.) was an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1979 by Ken and Roberta Williams. The company is known for pioneering the graphic adventure game genre, ...
);
Ken
Ken or KEN may refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Ken'' (album), a 2017 album by Canadian indie rock band Destroyer.
* ''Ken'' (film), 1964 Japanese film.
* ''Ken'' (magazine), a large-format political magazine.
* Ken Masters, a main character in ...
and
Roberta Williams
Roberta Lynn Williams (; born February 16, 1953) is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams. In 1980, her first game, ''Mystery House'', became a modest commerci ...
played the game and decided to design one of their own,
but with graphics.
Commercial era
Adventure International
Adventure International was an American video game publishing company that existed from 1979 until 1986. It was started by Scott and Alexis Adams. Their games were notable for being the first implementation of the adventure genre to run on a ...
was founded by
Scott Adams
Scott Raymond Adams (born June 8, 1957) is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the syndicated ''Dilbert'' comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, and business. ''Dilbert'' gained nation ...
(not to be confused with
the creator of ''Dilbert''). In 1978, Adams wrote ''
Adventureland'', which was loosely patterned after (the original) ''Colossal Cave Adventure''. He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell ''Adventureland'', thus creating the first commercial adventure game. In 1979 he founded Adventure International, the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction. That same year, ''
Dog Star Adventure'' was published in
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...
form in ''
SoftSide'', spawning legions of similar games in
BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
.
The largest company producing works of interactive fiction was
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
,
which created the ''
Zork
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and ...
'' series and many other titles, among them ''
Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (, from 'threefold') is the central dogma concerning the nature of God in most Christian churches, which defines one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the F ...
'', ''
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (sometimes referred to as ''HG2G'', ''HHGTTG'', ''H2G2'', or ''tHGttG'') is a comic science fiction, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally The Hitchhiker's Guide to th ...
'' and ''
A Mind Forever Voyaging
''A Mind Forever Voyaging'' (''AMFV'') is a 1985 interactive fiction game designed and implemented by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom. It is Infocom's seventeenth game. The game was intended as a Polemic, polemical critique of Ronald Reag ...
''.
In June 1977,
Marc Blank
Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first commercially successful text adventure computer games, ''Zork''.
Career
Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will ...
, Bruce K. Daniels,
Tim Anderson, and
Dave Lebling
Peter David Lebling (born October 30, 1949) is an interactive fiction game designer ( implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid.
Life and career
He was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Mar ...
began writing the mainframe version of ''Zork'' (also known as ''Dungeon''), at the
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, directly inspired by ''Colossal Cave Adventure''. The game was programmed in a computer language called
MDL MDL may refer to:
Computing
* Fayyad & Irani's MDL method, a discretization method
* MDL (programming language), derived from LISP
* The extension for Valve's Source, Source 2 and ID Software's IDTech game engines proprietary model file format
* ...
, a variant of
LISP
A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech.
Types
* A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
. The term Implementer was the self-given name of the creators of the text adventure series Zork. It is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be referred to as an
implementer, often shortened to Imp, rather than a writer. In early 1979, the game was completed. Ten members of the ''MIT Dynamics Modelling Group'' went on to join Infocom when it was incorporated later that year. In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the
Z-machine
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code ...
, a custom
virtual machine
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...
that could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and took standardized "story files" as input. In a non-technical sense, Infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters. The Infocom
parser
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lati ...
was widely regarded as the best of its era. It accepted complex, complete sentence commands like "put the blue book on the writing desk" at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two-word verb-noun combinations such as "put book". The parser was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and later games would 'understand' multiple sentence input: 'pick up the gem and put it in my bag. take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches'.
Infocom and other companies offered optional commercial
feelie
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone''.
Infocom was founded on ...
s (physical props associated with a game). The tradition of 'feelies' (and the term itself) is believed to have originated with ''
Deadline
Deadline(s) or The Deadline(s) may refer to:
* Time limit, a narrow field of time by which an objective must be accomplished
Arts, entertainment, and media Comics
* Deadline (DC Comics), a fictional villain
* ''Deadline'' (magazine), a Britis ...
'' (1982), the third Infocom title after ''Zork I'' and ''II''. When writing this game, it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited (80KB) disk space, so Infocom created the first feelies for this game; extra items that gave more information than could be included within the digital game itself. These included police interviews, the coroner's findings, letters, crime scene evidence and photos of the murder scene.
These materials were very difficult for others to copy or otherwise reproduce, and many included information that was essential to completing the game. Seeing the potential benefits of both aiding game-play immersion and providing a measure of creative copy-protection, in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy, Infocom and later other companies began creating feelies for numerous titles. In 1987, Infocom released a special version of the first three ''Zork'' titles together with plot-specific coins and other trinkets. This concept would be expanded as time went on, such that later game feelies would contain passwords, coded instructions, page numbers, or other information that would be required to successfully complete the game.
1980s
![Mystery House - Apple II render emulation - 2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Mystery_House_-_Apple_II_render_emulation_-_2.png)
United States
Interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies. By 1982 ''
Softline'' wrote that "the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hi-res graphics" in games like Sierra's ''
The Wizard and the Princess
''Wizard and the Princess'' (also ''The Wizard and the Princess'', with a leading article) is a graphic adventure game written for the Apple II and published in 1980 by On-Line Systems. It was the second title released in the '' Hi-Res Adventur ...
'' and its imitators. Such
graphic adventure
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based m ...
s became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics, like the Apple II.
By 1982
Adventure International
Adventure International was an American video game publishing company that existed from 1979 until 1986. It was started by Scott and Alexis Adams. Their games were notable for being the first implementation of the adventure genre to run on a ...
began releasing versions of its games with graphics.
The company went bankrupt in 1985.
Synapse Software
Synapse Software Corporation (marketed as SynSoft in the UK) was an American video game development and publishing company founded in 1981 by Ihor Wolosenko and Ken Grant. It initially focused on the Atari 8-bit family, then later developed for th ...
and
Acornsoft
Acornsoft was the software arm of Acorn Computers, and a major publisher of software for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. As well as games, it also produced a large number of educational titles, extra computer languages and business and util ...
were also closed in 1985. Leaving Infocom as the leading company producing text-only adventure games on the Apple II with sophisticated parsers and writing, and still advertising its lack of graphics as a virtue.
The company was bought by
Activision
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one o ...
in 1986 after the failure of ''
Cornerstone
The cornerstone (or foundation stone or setting stone) is the first stone set in the construction of a masonry foundation. All other stones will be set in reference to this stone, thus determining the position of the entire structure.
Over time ...
'', Infocom's database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later. Soon after Telaium/Trillium also closed.
Outside the United States
Probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U.S. was the
dungeon crawl
A dungeon crawl is a type of scenario in fantasy role-playing games in which heroes navigate a labyrinth environment (a "dungeon"), battling various monsters, avoiding traps, solving puzzles, and looting any treasure they may find. Video games an ...
game of ''
Acheton
The following list of text-based games is not to be considered an authoritative, comprehensive listing of all such games; rather, it is intended to represent a wide range of game styles and genres presented using the text mode display and their e ...
'', produced in Cambridge, England, and first commercially released by
Acornsoft
Acornsoft was the software arm of Acorn Computers, and a major publisher of software for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. As well as games, it also produced a large number of educational titles, extra computer languages and business and util ...
(later expanded and reissued by
Topologika
Topologika Software Ltd was an independent British publisher of educational software. Established in Stilton, Cambridgeshire in 1983, the company spent most of its life in Penryn, Cornwall before moving to Brighton, Sussex. The company was d ...
). Other leading companies in the
UK were
Magnetic Scrolls
Magnetic Scrolls was a British video game developer active between 1984 and 1990. A pioneer of audiovisually elaborate text adventure games, it was one of the two largest and most acclaimed interactive fiction developers of the 1980s.
''Magnet ...
and
Level 9 Computing
Level 9 was a British developer of computer software, active between 1981 and 1991. Founded by Mike, Nicholas and Pete Austin, the company produced software for the BBC Micro, Nascom, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Oric, Atari, Lynx 48k, RML 380Z, ...
. Also worthy of mention are
Delta 4
Delta 4 was a British software developer created by Fergus McNeill, writing and publishing interactive fiction.
Delta 4 designed games between 1984 and 1992. Some were self-published, others were released by CRL Group, Piranha Software, Silv ...
,
Melbourne House, and the homebrew company
Zenobi.
In the early 1980s
Edu-Ware
Edu-Ware Services, Inc. was an educational and entertainment software publisher established in 1979 bSherwin Steffinand Steven Pederson. It was known for its adventure games, role-playing video games, and flight simulators for the Apple II famil ...
also produced interactive fiction for the
Apple II
The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...
as designated by the "if" graphic that was displayed on startup. Their titles included the
''Prisoner'' and ''Empire'' series (''Empire I: World Builders'', ''Empire II: Interstellar Sharks'', ''Empire III: Armageddon'').
In 1981, CE Software published ''
SwordThrust
''SwordThrust'' is an interactive text adventure game for the Apple II, created by Donald Brown (programmer), Donald Brown and published by CE Software in 1981. It consists of seven separate adventures (each sold separately) and is the commercia ...
'' as a commercial successor to the
''Eamon'' gaming system for the Apple II. SwordThrust and Eamon were simple two-word parser games with many
role-playing
Role-playing or roleplaying is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' offers a definition of role-playing a ...
elements not available in other interactive fiction.
While SwordThrust published seven different titles, it was vastly overshadowed by the non-commercial Eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series. By March 1984, there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system (and over
270 titles in total as of March 2013).
In Italy, interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes. The largest number of games were published in the two magazines Viking and Explorer,
with versions for the main 8-bit home computers (
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer.
Referred to during development as the ''ZX81 Colour ...
,
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...
and
MSX
MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by Microsoft and ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, then vice-p ...
). The software house producing those games was Brainstorm Enterprise, and the most prolific IF author was Bonaventura Di Bello,
who produced 70 games in the Italian language. The wave of interactive fiction in Italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting the genre, then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers, celebrated on Web sites and in related newsgroups.
In Spain, interactive fiction was considered a minority genre, and was not very successful. The first Spanish interactive fiction commercially released was ''Yenght'' in 1983, by
Dinamic Software
Dinamic Software was a Spanish video game producer and publishing company. It was founded in 1983, and its activity ceased in 1992, comprising the Golden Era of Spanish Software. One year later, a part of its owners founded an independent compan ...
, for the ZX Spectrum. Later on, in 1987, the same company produced an interactive fiction about ''Don Quijote''. After several other attempts, the company
Aventuras AD
Aventuras AD was a Spanish video game developer, one of the most popular in Spain during the Golden Era of Spanish Software in the 1980s, specialized in text adventure games. It was created as a seal split from Dinamic Software in 1987 (''AD'' come ...
, emerged from Dinamic, became the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain, including titles like a Spanish adaptation of ''Colossal Cave Adventure'', an adaptation of the Spanish comic ''El Jabato'', and mainly the ''Ci-U-Than'' trilogy, composed by ''La diosa de Cozumel'' (1990), ''Los templos sagrados'' (1991) and ''Chichen Itzá'' (1992). During this period, the
Club de Aventuras AD (CAAD), the main Spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world, was founded, and after the end of Aventuras AD in 1992, the CAAD continued on its own, first with their own magazine, and then with the advent of Internet, with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non-commercial fiction nowadays.
During the 1990s
Legend Entertainment
Legend Entertainment Company was an American Video game developer, developer and Video game publisher, publisher of computer games, best known for creating Adventure game, adventure titles throughout the 1990s. The company was founded by Bob ...
was founded by
Bob Bates
Robert Bates (born December 11, 1953) is an American computer game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. ...
and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom. The text adventures produced by Legend Entertainment used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound. Some of their titles include ''
Eric the Unready
''Eric the Unready'' is an adventure game developed and published by Legend Entertainment for MS-DOS in 1993. ''Eric the Unready'' is a parody of the fantasy genre in general, though it parodies numerous other topics as well, ranging from '' Star ...
'', the ''
Spellcasting
An incantation, a spell, a charm, an enchantment or a bewitchery, is a magical formula intended to trigger a magical effect on a person or objects. The formula can be spoken, sung or chanted. An incantation can also be performed during ceremo ...
'' series and ''
Gateway'' (based on
Frederik Pohl
Frederik George Pohl Jr. (; November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satelli ...
's novels).
The last text adventure created by Legend Entertainment was ''
Gateway II'' (1992), while the last game ever created by Legend was ''
Unreal II: The Awakening'' (2003) – a well-known
first-person shooter
First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the pl ...
action game using the
Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine (UE) is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game ''Unreal''. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genres ...
for both impressive graphics and realistic physics. In 2004, Legend Entertainment was acquired by
Atari
Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc. (1972–1992), Atari, Inc., ...
, who published ''Unreal II'' and released for both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft's Xbox.
Many other companies such as Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Delta 4 had closed by 1992.
In 1991 and 1992,
Activision
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one o ...
released ''
The Lost Treasures of Infocom
''The Lost Treasures of Infocom'' is a 1991 compilation of 20 previously-released interactive fiction games developed by Infocom. It was published by Activision for MS-DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, and Apple IIGS versions. It was later re-released on ...
'' in two volumes, a collection containing most of Infocom's games, followed in 1996 by ''
Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom''.
Modern era
After the decline of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, an online community eventually formed around the medium. In 1987, the
Usenet
Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
newsgroup
rec.arts.int-fiction
was created, and was soon followed by
rec.games.int-fiction
. By custom, the topic of
rec.arts.int-fiction
is interactive fiction authorship and programming, while
rec.games.int-fiction
encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games, such as hint requests and game reviews. As of late 2011, discussions between writers have mostly moved from
rec.arts.int-fiction
to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum.
One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's
Z-Code format and Z-Machine
virtual machine
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...
in 1987 by a group of enthusiasts called the InfoTaskForce and the subsequent development of an interpreter (computing), interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it became possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers.
For years, amateurs with the IF community produced interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools.
The breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper, however, was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS, a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform, a programming language and set of libraries which compiler, compiled to a Z-Code story file. Each of these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community.
Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games. Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards, further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games. Modern games go much further than the original "Adventure" style, improving upon Infocom games, which relied extensively on puzzle solving, and to a lesser extent on communication with non-player characters, to include experimentation with writing and story-telling techniques.
While the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors. In 1998, Michael Berlyn, a former Implementor at Infocom, started a new game company, Cascade Mountain Publishing, whose goals were to publish interactive fiction. Despite the Interactive Fiction community providing social and financial backing Cascade Mountain Publishing went out of business in 2000.
Other commercial endeavours include Peter Nepstad's ''1893: A World's Fair Mystery'', several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment, The General Coffee Company's ''Future Boy!,'' ''Cypher (video game), Cypher'', a graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by ''Textfyre''. Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game ''City of Secrets'' but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself.
Artificial Intelligence
The increased effectiveness of Natural-language generation, natural-language-generation in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to instances of interactive fiction which use AI to dynamically generate new, open-ended content, instead of being constrained to pre-written material. The most notable example of this is ''AI Dungeon'', released in 2019, which generates content using the GPT-3 (previously GPT-2) natural-language-generating Artificial neural network, neural network, created by OpenAI.
Notable works
1970s
* ''Colossal Cave Adventure'', by
Will Crowther
William Crowther (born 1936) is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and ins ...
and
Don Woods Donald Woods (1933–2001) was a South African journalist and activist.
Donald or Don Woods may also refer to:
* Donald Woods (actor) (1906–1998), Canadian-born American film and television actor
* Donald Devereux Woods (1912–1964), British m ...
, was the first text adventure ever made.
* ''
Adventureland'', by
Scott Adams
Scott Raymond Adams (born June 8, 1957) is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the syndicated ''Dilbert'' comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, and business. ''Dilbert'' gained nation ...
, is considered one of the defining works of interactive fiction.
* The ''
Zork
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and ...
'' series by
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
(1979 onwards) was the first text adventure to see widespread commercial release.
1980s
* ''Softporn Adventure'', by Chuck Benton, a popular adult game that inspired the ''Leisure Suit Larry'' video game series.
* ''The Hobbit (1982 video game), The Hobbit'', by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler of Beam Software (1982) was an early reinterpretation of an The Hobbit, existing novel into interactive fiction, with several independent non-player characters.
* ''Planetfall'', by Steve Meretzky of Infocom (1983), featured Floyd the robot, which Allen Varney claimed to be the first game character who evoked a strong emotional commitment from players.
* ''Suspended (video game), Suspended'' by Michael Berlyn was an
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
game with a large vocabulary and unique character personalities.
* ''
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (sometimes referred to as ''HG2G'', ''HHGTTG'', ''H2G2'', or ''tHGttG'') is a comic science fiction, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally The Hitchhiker's Guide to th ...
'', by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky of Infocom (1984), involved the author of the original work in the reinterpretation.
* ''
A Mind Forever Voyaging
''A Mind Forever Voyaging'' (''AMFV'') is a 1985 interactive fiction game designed and implemented by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom. It is Infocom's seventeenth game. The game was intended as a Polemic, polemical critique of Ronald Reag ...
'', by Steve Meretzky of Infocom (1985), a story-heavy, puzzle-light game often touted as Infocom's first serious work of science fiction.
* ''The Pawn'', by
Magnetic Scrolls
Magnetic Scrolls was a British video game developer active between 1984 and 1990. A pioneer of audiovisually elaborate text adventure games, it was one of the two largest and most acclaimed interactive fiction developers of the 1980s.
''Magnet ...
was known for understanding complex instructions like 'PLANT THE POT PLANT IN THE PLANT POT WITH THE TROWEL'.
* ''Silicon Dreams'', by
Level 9 Computing
Level 9 was a British developer of computer software, active between 1981 and 1991. Founded by Mike, Nicholas and Pete Austin, the company produced software for the BBC Micro, Nascom, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Oric, Atari, Lynx 48k, RML 380Z, ...
(1986), a trilogy of interactive science fiction games.
* ''
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
''Leather Goddesses of Phobos'' is an interactive fiction video game written by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom in 1986. It was released for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Macintosh, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, Commodore 6 ...
'' by Steve Meretzky, a risqué sci-fi parody from
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
.
* ''Amnesia (1986 video game), Amnesia'' (1987), by Hugo Award and Nebula Award winning science fiction and fantasy author Thomas M. Disch, a text-only adventure published by Electronic Arts.
1990s
* ''
Curses
A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, ...
'', by Graham Nelson (1993), the first game written in the Inform programming language. Considered one of the first "modern" games to meet the high standards set by Infocom's best titles.
* ''Dunnet (video game), DUNNET'', by Ron Schnell (1992 eLisp port from the 1983 MacLisp original), surreal text adventure that has shipped with GNU Emacs since 1994, and thus comes with Mac OS X and most List of Linux distributions, Linux distributions; often mistaken for an Easter egg (media), easter egg.
* ''Anchorhead'', by Michael S. Gentry (1998) is a highly rated horror story inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
* ''Photopia'', by Adam Cadre (1998), one of the first almost entirely puzzle-free games. It won the annual Interactive Fiction Competition in 1998.
* ''Spider and Web'', by Andrew Plotkin (1998), an award-winning espionage story with many twists and turns.
* ''Varicella (video game), Varicella'' by Adam Cadre (1999). It won four XYZZY Awards in 1999 including the XYZZY Award for Best Game, and had a scholarly essay written about it.
2000s
* ''Galatea (video game), Galatea'', by Emily Short (2000). ''Galatea'' is focused entirely on interaction with the animated statue of the same name. Galatea has one of the most complex interaction systems for a non-player character in an interactive fiction game. Adam Cadre called Galatea "the best NPC ever".
* ''9:05'' by Adam Cadre. It is commonly seen as an easy gateway for people to get involved with interactive fiction.
* ''Slouching Towards Bedlam'', by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). Set in a steampunk setting, the game integrates meta-game functionality (saving, restoring, restarting) into the game world itself. The game won four XYZZY Awards.
* ''The Dreamhold'', by Andrew Plotkin (2004). Designed as a tutorial game for those new to IF, it provides an extensive help section.
* ''Façade (video game), Façade'' by Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern and John Grieve (2005). An interactive drama using
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
.
* ''Fallen London'', also known as ''Echo Bazaar'', an open-world work of interactive fiction, by Failbetter Games
* ''Lost Pig'' by Admiral Jota (2007). A comedic interactive fiction about an orc finding a pig that escaped from his farm. It won best game, best writing, best individual non-player character, and best individual player character in the 2007 XYZZY Awards.
2010s
* ''Howling Dogs'' by Porpentine (game designer), Porpentine (2012), hypertext fiction that explores escapism. It is considered one of the most prominent Twine games and was in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
* ''A Dark Room'' by Michael Townsend (2013), text-based mystery story and idle game. The story is only told through environmental cues, rather than dialogue or exposition.
* ''80 Days (2014 video game), 80 Days'' by inkle (company), inkle (2014). An interactive adventure based on the novel by Jules Verne, it was nominated by Time (magazine), ''TIME'' as their Game of the Year for 2014.
*''Depression Quest'' by Zoë Quinn (2014). Text-based game in which players take the place of a character who is clinically depressed. The release of the game is considered to be the catalyst of the Gamergate controversy.
*''AI Dungeon'' by Nick Walton (2019). It is notable for using artificial intelligence to dynamically generate an essentially unlimited amount of content.
Software
Development systems
The original interactive fiction ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' was programmed in
Fortran, originally developed by IBM. ''Adventure''s parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs.
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
's games of 1979–88, such as ''
Zork
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and ...
'', were written using a LISP-like programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language, it was referred to as both) that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized
virtual machine
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...
called the
Z-machine
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code ...
. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once, rather than once each game. Each game file included a sophisticated
parser
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lati ...
which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type "open the large door, then go west", or "go to the hall". With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously, including
Apple II
The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...
, Atari 8-bit family, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/Amstrad PCW, PCW (one disc worked on both machines),
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...
, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro
CP/M
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...
, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Atari ST, the Amiga and the Radio Shack TRS-80. Infocom was also known for shipping creative props, or "feelies" (and even "smellies"), with its games.
During the 1990s Interactive fiction was mainly written with C-like languages, such as TADS 2 and Inform 6. A number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist. The most popular remain Inform, TADS, or ADRIFT, but they diverged in their approach to IF-writing during the 2000s, giving today's IF writers an objective choice. By 2006 IFComp, most games were written for Inform, with a strong minority of games for TADS and ADRIFT, followed by a small number of games for other systems.
While familiarity with a programming language leads many new authors to attempt to produce their own complete IF application, most established IF authors recommend use of a specialised IF language, arguing that such systems allow authors to avoid the technicalities of producing a full featured parser, while allowing broad community support. The choice of authoring system usually depends on the author's desired balance of ease of use versus power, and the portability of the final product.
Other development systems include:
* David Malmberg's Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT)
* Incentive Software's Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC)
* Inkle (company), Inkle's Inkle (company)#Inklewriter, inklewriter
* Professional Adventure Writer
* Gilsoft's The Quill Adventure System, The Quill
* Twine (software), Twine
Interpreters and virtual machines
Interpreter (computing), Interpreters are the software used to play the works of interactive fiction created with a development system. Since they need to interact with the player, the "story files" created by development systems are programs in their own right. Rather than running directly on any one computer, they are programs run by Interpreters, or virtual machines, which are designed specially for IF. They may be part of the development system, or can be compiled together with the work of fiction as a standalone executable file.
The Z-machine was designed by the founders of
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
, in 1979. They were influenced by the then-new idea of a virtual Pascal computer, but replaced P with Z for Zork, the celebrated adventure game of 1977–79. The Z-machine evolved during the 1980s but over 30 years later, it remains in use essentially unchanged. Glulx was designed by Andrew Plotkin in the late 1990s as a new-generation IF virtual machine. It overcomes the technical constraint on the Z-machine by being a 32-bit rather than 16-bit processor. Frotz is a modern Z-machine interpreter originally written in C (programming language) by Stefan Jokisch in 1995 for DOS. Over time it was ported to other platforms, such as Unix, RISC OS, Mac OS and most recently iOS. Modern Glulx interpreters are based on "Glulxe", by Andrew Plotkin, and "Git", by Iain Merrick. Other interpreters include Zoom for Mac OS X, or for Unix or Linux, maintained by Andrew Hunter, and Spatterlight for Mac OS X, maintained by Tor Andersson.
Distribution
In addition to commercial distribution venues and individual websites, many works of free interactive fiction are distributed through community websites. These include the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDb), The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization (IFRO), a game catalog and recommendation engine, and the Interactive Fiction Archive.
Works may be distributed for playing with in a separate interpreter. In which case they are often made available in the Blorb package format that many interpreters support. A filename ending .zblorb is a story file intended for a Z-machine in a Blorb wrapper, while a filename ending .gblorb is a story file intended for a Glulx in a Blorb wrapper. It is not common but IF files are sometimes also seen without a Blorb wrapping, though this usually means cover art, help files, and so forth are missing, like a book with the covers torn off. Z-machine story files usually have names ending .z5 or .z8, the number being a version number, and Glulx story files usually end .ulx.
Alternatively, works may be distributed for playing in a web browser. For example, the 'Parchment' project is for web browser-based IF Interpreter, for both Z-machine and Glulx files.
Some software such as Twine (software), Twine publishes directly to HTML, the standard language used to create web pages, reducing the requirement for an Interpreter or virtual machine.
See also
* ''Get Lamp'', a documentary about interactive fiction
* Graphical adventure games, Graphic adventures, adventure games with roots in interactive fiction.
* Hypertext fiction
* Interactive storytelling
Notes
Further reading
*
* Keller, Daniel. "Reading and playing: what makes interactive fiction unique" p. 276-298. in Williams, J. P., & Smith, J. H. (2007). ''The players' realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming.'' Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co.
*
* Seegert, Alf. (2009), "'Doing there' vs. 'being there': performing presence in interactive fiction",
Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds' 1: 1, pp. 23–37,
* Robinson Wheeler, J, & Kevin, Jackson-Mead (2014), "IF Theory Reader", JRW Digital Media.
External links
Interactive Fiction Database(IFDB), a community site where one can find personalized recommendations for IF games to play.
intfiction.org a forum dedicated to discussing IF
The Interactive Fiction Archive a large archive of free-to-download and play interactive fiction.
Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive a more user-friendly interface for the IF archive.
a timeline of events in interactive fiction history at the Brass Lantern website.
The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization(IFRO), huge repository for text adventure game reviews written and rated by Interactive Fiction community players and members since 2004.
a beginner's introduction and setup guide to Interactive Fiction games and interpreters
The Interactive Fiction Wiki a MediaWiki wiki specific to Interactive Fiction.
Something about Interactive Fiction– MobyGames examines the history (and future) of this gaming genre.
*
{{Video game genre
Interactive fiction,
Collaborative writing
Role-playing game terminology