That’s only partially true for me; the missing criterion is “available, and mature enough.” When I first got started, Inform wasn’t out yet, TADS was commercial, AGT was AGT, and ADVSYS was free, so I got started with ADVSYS, and got sucked down the rabbit hole of writing new libraries and versions for it, rather than actually getting my games out the door. If I’d dumped it for Inform, I might have a longer (i.e. non-zero) ludography at the moment.
More recently, the “system used to make the game[s] I admire” is ZIL, and I gave it a go during Tara’s interregnum in which Zilf sat in a usable-but-not-well-supported state… and then stumbled across Dialog, which was well (enough) supported, and which is an absolute joy to program in. I keep thinking that I’ll get “back” to ZIL someday, but I’ve completely fallen in love with Dialog, to the point of getting sucked in to being one of its committers, and I’m probably in the Dialog world now for good.
Sometimes it’s “take any horse you want, so long as it’s the one at the door.”
$35 is still a lot of money for someone with a budget of $0 and I’m guessing those were the days before the Internet had reached the point of making piracy practically effortless to anyone who knew their way around a computer… And I’d argue part of the appeal of digital creation is that it comes closer to making something from nothing than most forms of physical creation(sure, you need a computer and the electricity to run it, but you can draw all day in a bundled with the computer or downloaded for free paint program but you need a constant supply of drawing surface and drawing implements to draw physically, and if you’re thinking about digital creation, you probably already have a computer and probably not thinking about its contribution to your electric bill, but are aware of the price of every sketchpad and box of colored pencils you buy at the craft shop(assuming you’re lucky enough to have one nearby you can get to).
It wasn’t the Internet that made piracy easy. Most of my library on my Commodore 64, and my (OG vertical format) Mac after it, was samizdat. Anything that wasn’t copy protected got passed around, and anything that was copy protected generally fell to sector-level cracking programs that also circulated as samizdat.
Being able to freely redistribute tools, to port them to other systems (I spent the 90s with various Unix boxes as my home computer) and to hack them to make better ones, was a bigger reason for why I wouldn’t touch TADS than the fact that I was a poor grad student (and then not-so-poor programmer) back then.
True enough, and people were making mix tapes long before Napster made piracy part of the vernacular. Still, prior to the advent of p2p filesharing, there was only so far those home-made bootleg floppies and copied tapes could spread, and you were kind of SOL if you didn’t live in a big city and had other nerds to network with.