Inform: Past, Present, Future - Story of a Text Adventure Game Engine

[mouser]

A nice long picture-heavy version of a talk given recently on the past and future of the text adventure game engines that set the standard for text adventure games, and powered such classics as Zork.

Inform is a domain-specific language, and its domain is the creation of interactive fiction. When it began in 1993, Inform was simply a new hacker tool for making what we used to call adventure games: that is, textual games with a turn cycle in which the player typed commands and the game then revealed an appropriate piece of story — a story partly generated dynamically, but partly following a narrative already laid out by the author. This is a genre of writing which began with recreational computing in the 1970s, then passed through a commercial phase in the 1980s. Inform is called Inform in part because of the classic works of a company called Infocom:

http://www.emshort.com/ifmu/inform.html

from boingboing.net

[Deozaan]

I kind of skimmed about the first half of it, and then quickly scrolled through the rest.

I didn't realize that there even existed a programming language that used such natural (human) language in it. That was probably my biggest takeaway. Just seeing some of the sentences and being impressed that Inform was able to derive meaning from them.

[Asudem]

Saw the title of this thread and felt obligated to keep it up to date with this finding!

A REDISCOVERED MAINFRAME GAME FROM 1974 MIGHT BE THE FIRST TEXT ADVENTURE

I've always wanted to try programming punchcards... hah, just kidding! What an archive though!