Comments on: The Adventure Library

By: Gary McGath

Gary McGath — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:09:40 +0000

It’s nice to see that people still occasionally pick up copies of my book.

By: p

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:47:13 +0000

holy cow, I read that Dacosta book as a kid!

I’m apple II-era, never seen a TRS-80, but that book was great for general game design.

I drew so many dang maps!

By: Rubes

Rubes — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:00:32 +0000

There's also rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, which are still active communities. And there's also the annual IF Comp, one of the annual interactive fiction competitions, which produces some really good works.

By: Chris Barts

Chris Barts — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:27:20 +0000

Yes, there is an interactive fiction community today. Here are some links:

XYZZY News, for the recent happenings.

The IF Wiki, for some community.

A list of games to play to get a flavor of what IF is about these days.

By: Random visitor

Random visitor — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:43:01 +0000

Since you know a lot about this: is there an active IF development scene today? Any quantum leaps/paradigm improvements being made (ie better AI in the game)? What is the most advanced (ie smart/complex/flexible) IF game ever? Thanks bro…

By: l.m.orchard

l.m.orchard — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:04:15 +0000

Wow. I think I’ve read at least 2/3 of the books in your list, and still have 1/4 of them on a shelf somewhere at home. This is some great stuff, and this post here really brings back 1984 memories. Hacking together my own naive Infocom-wannabe sentence parsers. Optimizing stretches of gnarly IF/GOSUB blocks in C64 BASIC into slightly more elegant runs of DATA statements. All to write text adventures for myself and 3 or 4 friends.

I’m *so* looking forward to GET LAMP.

By: Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:10:59 +0000

Hey, I know Jim Menick! I had no idea he wrote a book on designing adventure games.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:03:29 +0000

What memories! I entered many machine-language programs that I found printed in different Commodore magazines into my beloved C-64, typing hundreds of lines full of those POKE statements until my fingers cramped up. Unfortunately, after many hours and days of typing, most of the programs were real disappointments when you finally ran them, but it was still fun.

By: Ryan van Barneveld

Ryan van Barneveld — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:12:20 +0000

Wow, that’s a wonderful collection! Though, I’m quite surprised there’s no mention of “Hamlet on the Holodeck” on either your list, or the list that you’ve linked to.

By: Jason Wells

Jason Wells — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:42:49 +0000

Ah, the joys of “open source” as it existed for us mere mortals in the 1980s! For those of us who weren’t hacking gcc, we remember the pain of re-keying BASIC source printed on an ASR-33.

I remember owning several of these books! Most notably, I had Compute!’s Guide to Adventure Games. Mostly it was adventure game reviews but it also had generalized adventure-solving principles in the back (such as tips for making it through any maze of twisty passages).

Importantly, it had Tower of Mystery, the complete BASIC source for an adventure game. Its full annotations gave us nascent programmers a good understanding of some fairly advanced ideas like parsers.

Great times! Good to see the book covers again!