What an end to the segment! Votes aplenty poured out of hiding in the last twelve hours, making for an exciting finish to Round 5. A quick overview of the highlights:
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In the near court, #3 seed Superluminal Vagrant Twin took its best shot at Counterfeit Monkey and did surprisingly well against the seemingly invincible Atlantean puzzler. It took an early lead out of the gate, and after Monkey caught up at 4-4 it rocketed ahead again. In past segments, the tournament’s top seed has never had to work so hard – but work hard it did, soon pulling even at 8-8. Amazingly, Superluminal regained the lead a third time, surprising just about every onlooker as the match moved into second half of Day 1. By the end of the first day, however, calamity struck: An anonymous vote switch stole the challenger’s momentum and, in combination with another vote for the defender, left it down two at 10-8. The two opponents circled warily, scoring no goals, for the next two days, but a brief exchange in the last half day went in Counterfeit Monkey’s favor, and it secured the win with a final score of 12-9. Superluminal Vagrant Twin, which won the XYZZY Awards for Best Game and Best Implementation in 2016 and has appeared high in the last two editions of the Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time, was the second and final competing entry by C. E. J. Pacian, a pioneer in the limited parser format. We salute this king of its class and the author who produced it, and they retire from the playing field amid cheers and applause from the crowd.
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In the far court, #27 seed Spider and Web locked horns with #2 seed Anchorhead. Both games were originally released before the turn of the century and written in Inform 6, though an I7 version of Anchorhead was later published. Despite the disparity in seed rankings, players of the prediction game strongly favored the classic spy thriller, with three-quarters of them betting that it would win against the Lovecraftian interactive novella. After the starting pistol was fired, both games played strong on offense, and a rapid give-and-take of goals in the first few hours ran the score up to 5-5 without a clear leader. Spider and Web began to flag at that point, and in the next five hours Anchorhead pulled in a run of unopposed votes that put it ahead at 9-5. The challenger didn’t give up, and it kept scoring goals over the next two days, but most of these were matched by the defender, and with less than one full day left on the clock it was still behind 11-8. A last minute pair of goals brought it close to the leader at 11-10, but the defender matched those as well and finished the game at 13-11. Spider and Web was (perhaps suprisingly) the only competing entry written by Andrew Plotkin, who is one of the three most important people in modern IF. He has repeatedly extended the boundaries of the form in ways large and small, in terms of both gameplay and underlying technology. In addition, he has been extremely generous in sharing the fruits of his innovative efforts with the rest of the community – most especially the Glulx virtual machine, on which nearly every modern parser game runs. Spider and Web won a total of five XYZZY Awards in 1998: for Best Game, Best Puzzles, Best Individual Puzzle, Best Individual NPC and Best Use of Medium, and it is widely considered to contain the single greatest puzzle ever devised. It has appeared in every edition of the Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time, with positions ranging from 1st place to 4th. We salute this incomparable work and its incomparable author as they retire honorably from the arena to thunderous applause from the stands.