Proud to call myself a member of the Internet IF community. It's become one of my hobbies and one of my passions, and I'm The IF renaissance during grad school ('round about 1994.) Since that time, I'veĬreated four games, written dozens of reviews, and taken on the mantle of editorship atĪn IF-centered webzine. I was an avid Infocom gamer in my teens, and discovered The new wave of IF is centered in the Usenet newsgroups -fictionĪnd -fiction, and that's about Wonderful irony of this is that Willie Crowther, the co-author of Colossal Cave, wasĪlso part of the team that helped build the ARPANet, precursor to today's Internet.) The mid-90s saw an amazing IF Renaissance, thanks to the power of the Internet.
Infocom had a glorious heyday all throughout the 80s, only to crash at the end of theĭecade due to an ill-advised attempt at entering the business software market. To the tireless efforts of a company called Infocom. It soon found its way into the burgeoning personal computer market of its day, thanks Immersive game variously called Adventure or Colossal Cave. Its life on university and government mainframes in the shape of an addictive, Before that, it was called the text adventure. OfĬourse, it would only come to be called Interactive Fiction (or IF, to its devotees)Īfter it had matured a bit.
Torrid affair ensued, and the blessed child of this union was Interactive Fiction. Once upon a time, back in the mid-to-late 1970s, Fiction Writing met Game Programming. >VERBOSE - Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction page