IF in 1995: The Year in Review

by C.E. Forman

Thanks to everyone on rec.*.int-fiction who mailed contributions and suggestions! -- C.E.F.

January

"Waystation" by Stephen Granade, becomes the first major IF release of 1995.

February

"John's Fire Witch" by John Baker earns rave reviews on rec.games.int-fiction, demonstrating the strong points of a short work of IF (an interesting precursor to the competition).

"MacWesleyan/PC University" by Neil deMause is released on the IF archives at GMD.

April

David Baggett unveils the latest Unnkulian Unventure from Adventions, titled "The Legend Lives!"

After bemoaning a shortage of practical Inform code examples, designers on rec.arts.int-fiction begin discussing the possibility of an Inform programming competition, with the intent of increasing the amount of Inform public-domain code. Not wanting to be left out, TADS users raise a plea to create their own entries. At this point, little is agreed upon, and whether the contest will actually be held remains uncertain.

May

Rules for the competition are debated, but remain vague. Authors are eager to begin their entries but frustrated by the lack of consensus.

June

Activision re-releases the classic Infocom adventures, organized into five separate packages by genre and sold for around $20 each.

Version 1.0 of the Hugo adventure game compiler is released. Updated versions 1.1, 1.2, and 2.0 are released in the months that follow.

The latest version of the Inform compiler (5.5) appears on the archive. Inform 5.5 is a refinement of version 5.4, with few major enhancements. (Graham Nelson happily reports that the Inform language is now quite stable.)

July

Gerry Kevin Wilson takes on administration of the IF competition, solidifying procedures for entries. The deadline is set for the end of August, and prizes begin to be donated.

August

Brendon Wyber's interactive horror game "Theatre" reaches the archive, becoming the first of several 1995 Inform releases.

"Christminster," by Gareth Rees, is released.

IF players worldwide celebrate the 10th anniversary of Brian Moriarty's "Trinity," coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The IF competition reaches its deadline, having amassed a total of twelve entries.

September

Julian Arnold takes on the task of revising and maintaining the rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ.

Votes for the first annual IF competition are counted, and the winners are announced. First-place prizes go to Andrew Plotkin ("A Change in the Weather") for the Inform category, and Magnus Olsson ("Uncle Zebulon's Will") for the TADS category.

After two years of work, Graham Nelson's "Jigsaw" is finally released. In the weeks to follow, players discuss the implications of a non- gender-specific main NPC as a romantic interest in "Jigsaw."

October

David Baggett releases the TADS source code for "The Legend Lives!" to the IF archive.

A new edition of the Inform Designer's Manual is completed and uploaded to GMD. The latest version is nearly twice the size of the last document, with many clarifications, updates, and a larger number of examples.

November

"The Path to Fortune," volume 1 of the fantasy series "The Windhall Chronicles," is released.

A draft of a document describing standards for Z-machine interpreters (the format used in all Inform and Infocom games) is released, with a final version expected shortly after the beginning of the new year. Standardization of the Z-machine has made further progress in 1995 than any previous year.

December

Carl Muckenhoupt's "Baf's Guide to the IF Archive" is substantially revised and now totals 100 entries. The hundredth game reviewed is, appropriately enough, "Jigsaw."

"The Light: Shelby's Addendum" is released to GMD and Compuserve.

General Trends

Judging from Usenet discussions, the first annual IF competition coupled with the release of a large number of newly released titles marked 1995 as a banner year for the entire IF community. In addition to the short works produced through the competition, close to a dozen major works were released over the course of the year, many in the last six months alone.

The main event in '95 was, obviously, the first Internet IF competition. I haven't looked in the CompuServe GAMERS forum for quite some time, but my personal impression is that the volume of newly written IF has shifted from AGT and CIS/GAMERS to the Internet and rec.*.int-fiction. (The annual competitions on CIS were dropped with the support of AGT, and a new series of competitions -- I hope! -- was started here.)

Increased availability of quality IF has led to a substantial growth of the GMD archive (with a decrease in the CompuServe GAMERS forum, corresponding with the ending of maintenance and support for AGT), and increased traffic on the rec.*.int-fiction newsgroups. My own rough estimate is that the number of daily posts has almost tripled from the end of 1994. Discussions themselves have begun to venture specifically into the areas of evaluating and critiquing the latest works.

Graham Nelson put it best in an e-mail conversation: "We are slowly moving towards intelligent criticism (rather than, as used to be the case, discussion consisting only of praising old Infocom games to the skies, as though they were all equally good)...At this moment, for instance, people are debating 'isn't Jigsaw a rather patchy game?' and I'm pleased to see this: people are singling out what they like and dislike, in a way which didn't happen a few years ago with Curses, for example." The beginning of the end of the IF shortage is perhaps largely responsible for this turn in players' behavior, as gamers are no longer afraid of "scaring off" any and all potential authors through such scrutinization.

A shift in the TADS-to-Inform ratio marks another interesting aspect of this year. Inform saw its first surplus with five new titles, all within the last six months, while new TADS games were in short supply compared to previous years, with only three or four major releases (although there's no denying the fact that one of these, David Baggett's "The Legend Lives!", drew anticipation unheard of since the days of Infocom). At the time of this writing, I've heard of an almost equal number of upcoming Inform and TADS games, so a major change in the language of preference is not immediately apparent . The two still seem to be quite equally balanced, and there were equal numbers of entries for each (six apiece) in the competition. Now that more public-domain Inform source code is readily available (again, largely through the competition), we may see an increase in fledgling Inform programmers.

Aiding public interest in Inform were large strides toward sound, in interpreters like ZIP2000, and graphics (version 6 of the Z-Machine), which in turn were brought about primarily through the release of the more clearly written and standardized version 0.2 of the "Specification of the Z-Machine." The Inform language has also seen growth, with Inform 6.0 visible on the horizon and a fully-working Inform linker to be released soon. A Spanish-language translation of the Inform system is also essentially finished and awaiting release.

Mainstream interest in text adventures may also be picking up again. This year we've seen a substantial increase in the number of both IF-related Web sites and online hyperfiction (multiple-path stories in which readers follow different links to influence the plot). Numerous Infocom-related home pages and guides have made it easier for users to locate and use the GMD archive. The summer re-release of the classic Infocom adventures through Activision may rekindle players' memories of text adventures, and a number of computer books and magazines have had disks or CDs containing text adventures packaged along with them. The possibility of packaging the entire GMD archive on CD-ROM, and the upcoming InfoMac CD, have also generated discussion on Usenet.

All in all, 1995 was a tremendous year for IF, but (as FrobozzCo International President John D. Flathead would say), 1996 should be even tremendouser!

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