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Heirs of Infocom: Where interactive fiction authors and games stand today

In my review of Get Lamp, the documentary about text adventures, I mentioned that the original Infocom employees believed the market for these games could exist for hundreds of years. After all, the novel is still around today and, despite stiff competition from movies and video games, writing fiction is still a profitable endeavor. Why not interactive fiction?

The reality, however, is that since the demise of Infocom in 1989, many people have tried to make interactive fiction into a commercial endeavor. None have been able to figure out how to make the financial side work—until recently. Everything changed with the rise of smartphones and tablets.

I had a lot of fun interviewing people like Michael Berlyn for this article, and I think it came out really well. Now I kind of want to write my own text adventure... hmm...
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/heirs-of-infocom-where-interactive-fiction-authors-and-games-stand-today/

xradionut on 2013-06-24 10:34:35.000

Awesome!

I’ve been avoiding Ars, except for articles like yours.

Have you seen Inform7? http://inform7.com/

Jeremy Reimer on 2013-06-24 11:41:01.000

That's pretty cool. I wouldn't mind making a text adventure for iOS-- that seems like it would be pretty neat.

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