What is "Interactive Fiction"? Interactive Fiction is the name given to text-based interactive adventure games where the game world is described in words rather than graphics and the player has to respond with simple words (usually commands) as well. They started out on college mainframes and expanded to the newly-emerging home computers in the 1980s. Companies such as Infocom, Level 9, Epic and Magnetic Scrolls produced many fine examples of the genre in this period, and now IF is being kept alive by a dedicated band of enthusiasts on the Internet, who produce quality works mainly for free.
Where are these free works of IF? They are stored at an official IF-archive in Germany. The address for the IF-archive is ftp.gmd.de/if-archive and the games directory in particular is ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games.
Which systems do they run on? Some of the games have been written for specific platforms, e.g. PC, Archimedes, Atari etc, and these games can be found in the directory that is named after the platform they run on. However, to encourage portability of games between platforms, there are several special formats that require interpreters to run. The most popular of these are TADS, Infocom-format and Hugo. Interpreters for many platforms are available at the IF-archive - in particular, there are Acorn and PC interpreters for all the three mentioned formats, and there are Macintosh interpreters for the first two. Once you have picked up an interpreter, you can run practically all games in that particular format, depending on the quality of the interpreter and the capabilities of your computer.
Where can I get more information? There are two Usenet newsgroups devoted to the subject, and the folk there are generally a friendly and witty bunch. The newsgroup rec.games.int-fiction is about the playing of IF games, and rec.arts.int-fiction is about the writing of such games. Newcomers are very welcome indeed, but note that these are discussion groups, so large binary postings (anything more than 10-15k) are most definitely not wanted. You might also want to take a look at Baf's guide to the internet, which includes reviews of most of the games at the IF-archive. I have no hesitation in recommending this site, as my game has been given a good review.
As a final note in this section, the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition recently closed. All 34 entries are available at the IF archive in the location .../games/competition97. Twenty of these are in Inform format, ten are in TADS, and four others use different systems (HUGO, AGT, ALAN, JACL). The results of the competition should be within the above directory as well.
This page last updated 10 January 1998