Documenting and preserving early IF (on IFDB, IFArchive)

[bg]

I’m starting a new thread so that this discussion doesn’t get lost in the very long poll thread.

Continuing the discussion from Poll: When did you play IF for the first time?:

@Warrigal

Castle by Peter Langston (written using his Wander system for mainframes) was released in 1974.

@bg

I don’t see that on IFDB. Maybe it should be added!

@Warrigal

There are hundreds of early games (i.e. prior to 1990) that aren’t on IFDB. CASA is a better source for these. Would someone like to add them? This may require some research.

Games written using Wander include:

• Aldebaran III (Peter Langston)
• Castle (Peter Langston)
• Library (Nat Howard)

There’s also a game by Lou Katz that I don’t think has been preserved.

@Jade

I have most of the games reviewed in *Renga in blue” untill last year.
I comented here if someone was interested in adding to ifarchive without response.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

I comented here if someone was interested in adding to ifarchive without response.

Are these mostly sourced from archive.org? I don’t see a lot of value in uploading them to the IF Archive. IFDB seems to be the more useful discussion.

[bg]

@Warrigal

Castle by Peter Langston (written using his Wander system for mainframes) was released in 1974.

There’s now a very minimal page for this game at IFDB. Feel free to edit and add info, links, etc.

[Jade (Javier Garza)]

I have posted in intfiction threads only games that are absolutely imposible to find out.
It seems that I must have some completacionist disprder or so, but I was stocking all the games into an Google drive’s account.

[jcompton]

I mean.

There was that month or so that Internet Archive was offline.

[bg]

Wander now has a minimal authoring system page on IFWiki.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Wander is definitely a fascinating one. It originated the MUD convention of having parsing and actions coded per-room instead of globally, and Aldebaran III seems to be the first piece of IF where you play as a specific predefined character, as well as the first unlicensed IF adaptation of an existing property.