by Miron Schmidt
and Manuel Schulz and the Magnetic Scrolls Fact Sheet by
Stefan Meier and Gunther Schmidl. Hans Persson's Adventureland
catalogue and the master index of ftp.gmd.de are also
indispensable. On connections with literary precursors, see Gareth
Rees's 1994 article Tree fiction. The number of games said
to have origins before 1979 is somewhat akin to the number of American
families claiming descent from the Mayflower pilgrims and one
must approach claims to priority with caution. But it is clear that
too little is known about the games libraries in circulation in the
mid-1970s. Peter Langston's ‘Wander’ (1974), a text-based
world modelling program included in his PSL games distribution for Unix
and incorporating rooms, states and portable objects, was at least a
proto-adventure: perhaps many others existed, but failed to find a
Don Woods to complete the task? So much appearsThe well-established canon of
“important” or “classic” games still talked
about today consists of about 100 titles. At most fifty titles of the
1990s remain in regular play through being rediscovered.
•The Quill and its variants
continued even into the 1990s, at least for the prolific Dorothy Millard,
whose games are off-beat variations of “you are stranded”:
the most off-beat of all being ‘Yellow Peril’ (1994), in
which the entire world has become yellow.
•1993 was the year of the explosion
of the World Wide Web, during which it grew by a factor of 3,000. But
in 1992, personal web pages barely existed, and it seemed not only natural
but unavoidable to house games at a centralised library, ftp.gmd.de.
The continued importance of this IF-archive is a major part of the solidarity
of today's community.

2
‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’
(1978), by