longer tied to any game design system, essentially resumed in 1995
as the rec.arts.int-fiction competition.

§46.4 Newsgroups and revival 1992–

The rest of the infrastructure of the present interactive
fiction community was created by four almost simultaneous events: first,
the creation of specific Usenet
newsgroups (on or before 21 March 1992,
21 September 1992), moving away from sporadic and easily drowned-out talk
in the early net.games and the later rec.games.programming,
while asserting an artistic medium by moving to the rec.arts.*
sub-hierarchy, where theatre and the novel are also discussed. Next,
the founding of the interactive fiction archive at ftp.gmd.de
by Volker Blasius and David M. Baggett (24 November 1992), the release
of TADS 2.0 (6 December 1992), significant because it established
the dominance of TADS, and the release of Inform 1 (10 May 1993), though
not until 1995 was Inform seriously used.

The proximityof these dates is no coincidence: they
followed the sudden, widespread and cheap release of the entire Infocom
back catalogue, in two volumes, Lost Treasures of Infocom I
(January 1992) and II (July 1992), which stimulated a revival
both of the cult of Infocom and of interactive fiction in general.
If Infocom is to be compared with Shakespeare then this was the First
Folio. Anybody who had occasionally liked Infocom's games in the past
suddenly had all of them, while players' expectations of quality rose.
Infocom antiquarianism occupies much of the early newsgroup traffic;
much of the initial stock at ftp.gmd.de consisted of fact-sheets
on Infocom story files; and the collectors of these diamonds were provided
with a rhinestone machine when Inform, which compiled Infocom-format
story files, appeared. Design systems successful in the mid-1980s,
which were not well-adapted to build Infocom-scale