everybody's pleasure.

§46.3 The growth of a community c. 1985–91

One by one, the companies ceased to publish text-based
games: Adventure International (1985), Synapse (1986), Infocom (1989),
Level 9 (1991), Topologika (1992), Magnetic Scrolls (1992). The last
stalwart, Legend Entertainment – which had inherited two of the
designers of Infocom's last days, Bob Bates and Steve Meretzky –
made the last mainstream release of a game with a parser in 1993
(‘Gateway II: Homeworld’, by Mike Verdu and Glen Dahlgren)
and so, according to some, the dark ages began: the adventure games which
flourished in the marketplace were fiction of a kind, and steerable,
but no longer interactive in any conversational sense. Yet the same
advance of technology which drove the irresistable rise of graphics
and animation also brought interactive fiction writing into the home.
Between 1980 and 1990 the
personal computer wentfrom being barely
able to play a text game to being easily able to compile one.

To be able to program a PDP-10, as Crowther and Woods
had, was a professional qualification, but early microcomputers came
with the easily learned programming language BASIC built in, and
also with manuals which emphasised that computers were more for writing
your own programs than for using other people's. Minimal adventure
programming is not complicated – indeed adventure game-writing has
been used to teach children about computing (Creating a Database,
1985, Steve Rodgers and Marcus Milton) – and the slowness of a
program written in BASIC does not much matter for a text adventure.
So, parallel to the commercial market and at the cheaper end merging
into it, hobbyists had had been devising their own adventures since at
least May 1979, when Lance Micklus published