Interactive Fiction

Kevin Bentley woke up feeling awful, pulling back the curtains of his new apartment in San Mateo, California. Only a year out of high school, the New Jersey native had been hired by local software company Cognetics and turned loose on the project of simply “implementing” a script by well-known…

The technology of the future with the genre from the past — This is the non-interactive version of the interactive article Text Games during the Flash era. To play the interactive version click here. Text adventure was always a thriving genre. Arguably it was even the first genre of videogame.Theypredate the Internet, and yet managed to stay relevant on this new support…

My book on the incredible history of interactive fiction launched TODAY on Kickstarter: Find out how to reserve your copy now!

When and what was the first digital text shown on a screen? It depends, as always, on your exact definitions of those words. But here’s one plausible candidate. In 1947, British inventors Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn were playing around with newly invented CRTs (cathode ray tubes) which could use…

Something very cool is coming… A collectible book about the first half-century of interactive fiction. Deep dives into fifty text games from Zork to Trade Wars to Fallen London to Lifeline. Sign up to be notified on launch & join the adventure! (You can also find out more details about the project on my Substack.)

This is meant to be a fun post about a language I bumped into many years ago when I was a backend server engineer working in the games industry. It’s not a language a lot of people have been exposed to and my article is simply meant to only get…

It has been fascinating to watch the medium of games evolve over the decades I’ve been able to experience them. From the early days where they were pure escapism, to their early adulthood where they danced on the edge of being mainstream to today where they now sit alongside all…