Finally, after six weeks of waiting, the results are in. The winners in the Sixth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition have been announced.

And the winner is...Kaged, by Ian Finley! Ian has been writing IF for a while; his first game, Babel placed 2nd in the 1997 competition. Among his other works, Exhibition placed 5th in the 1999 competition.

I asked him for his reaction to winning the competition, and being the first TADS author to do so since the TADS and Inform competitions were unified in 1996.

I must say I'm in a state of shock winning the competition in a year with SO MUCH good stuff. Indeed, I'm almost abashed to take first over authors such as Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin, who are clearly masters of the medium. Regarding being the first TADS author to do so, I have to admit that I adore the system and while Inform no doubt has its good points, TADS, and especially HTML-TADS (creating the media was such fun!) has grown on me to the point of total addiction. Viva .Gam!

The top ten games were

1. Kaged, by Ian Finley
2. Metamorphoses, by Emily Short
3. Being Andrew Plotkin, by J. Robinson Wheeler
4. Ad Verbum, by Nick Montfort
5. Transfer, by Tod Levi
6. My Angel, by Jon Ingold
7. Nevermore, by Nate Cull
8. Masquerade by Kathleen M. Fischer
9. YAGWAD, by Digby McWiggle
10. Shade, by Andrew Plotkin

Since authors are not allowed to vote in the actual competition, they vote for a secondary prize, the Miss Congeniality prize. The top three Miss Congeniality winners were

1. Ad Verbum
2. Rameses
3. A tie between Metamorphoses and Shade