The birth of text adventure games can be traced back to the early seventies and a game written in FORTRAN by Will Crowther called Advent. From here the genre grew, enjoying a period of enormous popularity from the early Scott Adams' adventures to the best-selling Infocom classics.
But the honeymoon was soon to be over. As hardware technology continued to advance, graphics and sound became increasingly fashionable and software houses like Infocom closed their doors, unable to compete commercially.
The result was the steady growth of a community of amateur authors, and a new generation of people eager to play their creations. Unlike the pioneering Will Crowther, today's author has a choice of languages far more appropriate than FORTRAN for writing text adventure games, and JACL is one such language. It provides a rich vocabulary for the player and a simple, yet powerful set of tools for you, the author. Together they enable the rapid creation of high-quality text adventure games, also known as interactive fiction, that can be played locally or over the internet by people from all over the world.
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Stuart Allen Dangar Island, Australia May 1999 |