‘Dog Star Adventure’
in a computing magazine. This was the first of many type-it-in-yourself
games which some readers, at least, adapted and reworked as they typed.
Scott Adams's ‘Adventureland’ source was itself published
in Byte (1980) and, within a year, reworked into the core of
Brian Howarth's rival ‘Mysterious Adventures’. (No less
than three Scott Adams-format adventure-making programs existed for
the TI-99/4a microcomputer alone, and Adams-format games in circulation
outnumber his official titles by at least three to one.) Dozens of
books with titles like Adventure Games For Your Commodore 64
(Duncan Quirie, 1984) consisted of little more than unannotated and
– partly because of the need to save every possible byte of memory
– almost incomprehensible BASIC listings, often rushed into print
by coders with more enthusiasm than skill, and seldom properly tested.

The major companies each had in-house systems for
designingadventure games (see §41 for a
sample of Infocom's ZIL): these never emerged into the public eye.
But a popular design tool called The Quill (Graeme Yeandle,
1983), running on the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 microcomputers,
allowed many hobbyists working from home to sell their wares. Yeandle's
generous acknowledgement in the manual that the system “has its
origins in an article written by Ken Reed and published in the August
1980 issue of Practical Computing” is further testament to the
influence of 1979–80 magazines in spreading the word. At least
60 commercial releases in the period 1983–6 were Quilled.
(Graphic Adventure Creator (Sean Ellis, 1986), was also popular
later on. Two corresponding American commercial systems, Adventure
Writer and Adventure Master were less fruitful.) Yet tiny
BASIC games were inevitably toy models of the real thing, and even
The Quill could not