I suppose it's time I checked back into in the world of interactive fiction, as I only ever played the old-school Infocom-era ones. Anyone else want to see how it's changed since then?

Let's Tell a Story Together (A History of Interactive Fiction) by Jimmy Maher

When I was a kid my best friend's brother played these games quite a bit. I remember he spent hours typing away.

While I was an avid reader, IF never really caught on with me. Thinking back, I had a Fantastic Four game for the Commodore that frustrated me to no end. I couldn't get past the first scene. My character was stuck in a tar pit and I couldn't get him out.

I started writing one in Gw-Basic for a programming project in high school. I quit half way through because everyone was doing the same thing. Instead I wrote a simple x&o program that go tbetter the more you played against it.

No, I don't claim to have created artificial intelligence but interestingly enough, I found the project for a game in a very old fashioned "Annual for Boys" kind of book. This book was already an antique but it had a section where you played a simplified X&O game and you filled a matchbook with colored buttons for each possible scenario. Each button represented a possible move for the scenario. If the game won, you put the button back. If it lost, you took the button out and played again. Super simple memory, long before the first computers were anything more than Tom Swift books.

Simple but impressive in many ways.