You are standing at the end of the road in front of a small brick building.
This simple sentence first appeared on a PDP-10 mainframe in the 1970s, and the words marked the beginning of what we now know as interactive fiction.
From the simple text adventures of the 1980s to the soulful hypertext works of the creators of Twine, interactive fiction is an art form that continues to inspire a loyal audience. The Interactive Fiction Community, or IF, brings readers and players together with developers and creators. It champions an open source ethos and a punk personality.
But whatever its production value or artistic merit, at its heart, interactive fiction is just words on a screen. In this age of AAA video games, prestige television, and contemporary novels and poetry, how does interactive fiction continue to endure?
To understand the history of IF, the best place to turn for insight is the authors themselves. Not just the authors of notable text-based games—though many of the people I interviewed for this article do have that claim to fame—but the authors of the communities and tools that keep the torch burning. Here’s what they had to say about IF and its legacy.
Explore the roots: Adventure and Infocom
The history of interactive fiction began in the 1970s. The first widely played game in the genre was A colossal cave adventurealso known simply as An adventure. The text game was made by Will Crowther in 1976 based on his spelunking experience at Kentucky’s aptly named Mammoth Cave. Descriptions of the various spaces will appear on the terminal, then players will enter two-word commands — a verb followed by a noun — to solve puzzles and navigate the game’s sprawling caverns.
In the 1970s, being able to interact with a computer was a rare and special thing for most people.
“My dad’s office had an open house in about 1978,” recalls IF author and tool creator Andrew Plotkin. “We all went in and looked at the computers – computers were very exciting in 1978 – and he fired up An adventure at one of the terminals. And I, being eight years old, realized that this was the best thing in the universe and immediately wanted to do it forever.”
“It’s hard to overstate how powerful the impact of this game was,” said Graham Nelson, creator of the Inform language and author of the landmark IF Curses, to enter it in the field. “Partly this was because the giant machine-like thing controlling the story was itself outside of ordinary human experience.”
Perhaps this exceptional factor is what piqued the curiosity of the likes of Plotkin and Nelson to play An adventure and the other text games that followed. The roots of interactive fiction are intertwined with the roots of the computer industry. “I think it’s always been a focus on the written word as the engine for what we think of as play,” said software developer and tech entrepreneur Lisa Daly. “It was originally born out of a need for primitive computing in the 1970s and 1980s, but people found there was a lot to mine there.”
Home computers were just beginning to gain popularity when Stanford University student Don Woods released his own version of An adventure in 1977, based on Crowther’s original work on Fortran. Without wider access to relatively diminutive machines like the Apple 2 and Vic-20, Scott Adams might not have found an audience for his own text adventure games, published by his company Adventure International, in another tribute to Crowther. As computers spread to more people around the world, interactive fiction was able to reach more and more readers.
