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IF author, developer, and critic Graham Nelson has characterized interactive fiction as "a narrative at war with a crossword puzzle".
Today, interactive fiction no longer appears to be commercially viable, but a constant stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems. Most of these games can be downloaded for free from the Interactive Fiction Archive (see external links).
Since 1995 there has been an annual Interactive Fiction Competition for relatively short works. There are also annual XYZZY Awards given out in various categories, modelled on the Academy Awards. Another annual competition, the Spring Thing, has been held since 2001 to highlight works considered to be too long for the Interactive Fiction Competition.
Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game and the game state is relayed to the player via text output.
Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as "get key" or "go east" which may be handled by a simple parser. Parsers vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity from sentences such as "open the red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today.
Works of interactive fiction bear a passing similarity to Multi-User Dungeons or 'MUDs', a form of online text-based role-playing game which became popular in the mid-1980s. The resemblance is a passing one, however -- though both rely on a textual medium, MUDs are not works of fiction, but communities of players.
In 1975, Will Crowther wrote the first text adventure game, AdventureAdventure (also known as ADVENT or Colossal Cave was the first computer game to appear in the genre of interactive fiction (before it was even called that). Will Crowther, a programmer at the legendary Bolt, Beranek & Newman (developers of ARPANET, the fo (originally called ADVENT, and later Colossal Cave). It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of In 1976, Don WoodsDon Woods is a perennial hacker and computer programmer. Woods teamed with James Lyon while both were attending Princeton in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive INTERCAL programming language. Later, he worked at the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), where discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and obtained Crowther's permission to expand the game. Crowther's original version was more or less realistic; Woods' changes were reminiscent of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano inspired by Mount Doom.
In 1976, the game began spreading on ARPANet, and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems.
The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability.
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