When I was a teenager my dad’s office was in the same building as the Infocom offices. I remember hanging around in the hallways and on the elevator hoping to “bump” into someone from that office. So do you suppose the Infocom programmers knew they had little teeny bopper girl groupies? I can only imagine he I had met someone… “hey, what game are you working on? Can I have your autograph?”
But playing their games did inspire me to grow up and become a real programmer. What has IF inspired you to do?
I was not into IF in my teens, I’ve been an arcade/console gamer from the get go. Aside from some minor text-adventures with lousy graphics running on MSX, I knew nothing about it. It was on the world wide web in the late 90’s that I got to know TADS and IFcomp. And then to delve into the history of this intriguing genre…
I guess it inspired me to have more respect for turn-based games and indie game devs, plus the narrative possibilities of role playing a game rather than being fed static cutscenes.
Draw lots of stupid IF maps for games I never made, one of which had a location for every 10 square meter. It also made me listen to everything MC Frontalot ever released.
…and I think it might have been responsible for me almost burning my home down. (During a game I went AFK, left the house, and came back finding that my Spectrum transformer should not be placed underneath a pillow, because that would cause rectangle shaped burn marks in it. I paniced, and fried my Spectrum with another transformer fifteen minutes after that. No more computer.)
I blame IF for all of it.