The Escapist, a high-falutin' games magazine, has an article discussing interactive fiction. The article was written by Allen Varney, who you might know from his work on certain RPGs.
If you're under 38, you're now saying, "Huh?" Text games (or, as some called them, "interactive fiction") were once the most popular electronic games. Yet they vanished overnight from store shelves, driven into darkness by the IBM PC's EGA and VGA graphics adapters.
But in obscure reaches of the field, text games survive to this day. Indeed, despite (or because of) no sales, they're currently enjoying an artistic Silver Age. Just as traditional craftspeople even today use time-honored techniques to hand-tool birchbark canoes and embroider lace doilies and program the Commodore 64, devoted hobbyists still play and design text games.
Stu George has released Bunyon, a Glk-based interpreter that plays Scott Adams games...as long as they're in the TI99/4A format. Currently Bunyon supports Glkterm and WinGlk.
Now available: version 0.8 of Interactive Fiction Mapper, Gonzalo Garramuno's Ruby-based mapping program for interactive fiction.
The main highlights of this release are:
- PDF output now splits big sections into multiple pages when they
won't fit on the page.
- Automatic mapping of games from Infocom-style transcripts including
stub exits and objects (even while you are playing the game!)