Interactive Fiction Competition 2000

In 2000, I entered the Interactive Fiction Contest, which is a competition to write text adventure games reminiscent of Zork. “Interactive Fiction” is the politically correct term, as a lot of these games have evolved from the classic Infocom/Scott Adams/Eamon styles into more elaborate performance art pieces in which the authors don’t want to be tainted with the concepts of “puzzles” or “entertainment.”

My submission, The Best Man, was far too ambitious for an initial go; still, it placed 15^th out of 53, not bad for a novice. But then, I’ve always felt it is best to jump into a new environment with a large project than putter around with small ones. I was crippled by a distinct lack of enthusiasm from most of my friends; fortunately, Chris Livingston made up the slack and did the work of a dozen playtesters. Still, the bugs caught (and missed) reflect the lack of diversity in the test group.

We were encouraged to rerelease the games, fix the bugs discovered during the competition, and simplify the puzzles found too difficult by the reviewers. It has been almost two years since I submitted the game, and this is the first post-competition release.

Every attempt to release a fix has been jinxed. To wit:

• Two weeks after the competition results came in, I sat down to make some repairs to the game. Less than three hours later, I somehow managed to knock my laptop onto the floor, cracking the motherboard. Amazingly, the hard drive was salvagable.
• Two months after smashing my laptop, I get a new one. Problem: My game files are on a ZIP disk. My ZIP drive is SCSI. The new TiBook has no SCSI interface.
• Six months after that, I purchase a new ZIP drive. But schoolwork coupled with depression make working on the game impossible.
• Some time later, I wake up one morning, unable to sleep. Having nothing better to do, I decide to work on the game. Three hours later, I am distracted by something on television. The date?

  September 11, 2001.

The last one spooked me. I’m not normally superstitious, but the mental connection between the game (describing a terrorist plot to kill the President) and the actual events disturbed me greatly. In a sense, the school work saved me: I was seriously considering submitting a game for the 2001 competition in which the main character ends up blowing up a building. Not good.

Anyway, enjoy. If you find any bugs, even typographical ones, feel free to contact me. I recently rediscovered the source code on a dusty archive. It may be slightly out-of-date with this final release, though, so fixing a bug will probably introduce a dozen regressions…

• The official competition page
• Thoughts on the competition (sketchpad reviews)
• Playing the game itself, in four easy steps:
  1. First, download an interpreter for your system:
     • Microsoft Windows (suggested by mdxi)
     • MacOS Classic 68K
     • MacOS Classic PPC
     • MacOS X
     • Other operating systems
  2. Next, download the latest build of the game.
  3. Download the feelies as PDF or plain text.
  4. Download the map if you're stuck.