Hello! I’m Perry, and I’m 38 years old. Nice to meet you.
When I was a little kid, my father asked me a weird question that – for some reason – I remember to this day: “Would you like to play a game that let’s you experience adventures for yourself?” What he meant was the point-and-click adventure game Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on our Atari ST.
I had played computer and console games before, but this was different. This was a game that didn’t whip me through obstacle courses with repeating backgrounds. This was a game that put me in into a world with actual real-life locations like New York and Venice, filled them to the brim with puzzles, secrets, stuff to read and people to talk to, then gave me 14 (fourteen!) different verbs, neatly arranged on the bottom of the screen, and all the time in the world. The possibilites seemed endless.
One fateful day, me and a friend discovered a book in the school library that teaches BASIC to children, opening up a whole new world to me. I started writing all sorts of text adventures (mainly consisting of simplistic if/then-statements), including the only sizable game I ever actually finished, an in-joke-filled puzzle romp for my girlfriend at the time.
It took a few more years (and English classes) until I eventually got to play Infocom games and discover the “modern” (early 2000s) IF scene, fascinating me immensely. A Mind Forever Voyaging in particular struck a cord with me, hence my internet handle that I use almost everywhere. Around that time, I started playing around with a German IF authoring system called TAG, but never got far.
Then, one day, Inform 7 got announced, which felt life-changing to me. I remember reading about it and getting excited to the point of nerdgasmic tears. This was what I had waited for. A tool made specifically for people like me, with a brain torn between an artsy fartsy “literature” half and a more technical minded “computer science” half.
Eventually, I wrote my diploma thesis in German Studies on “Interactive Fiction as a literary form”, with a focus on the German-speaking scene. (Nobody at the German Studies department had any idea what I was talking about. I could have told them anything :D)
Have I ever finished something in Inform 7? Of course not. I had so much fun playing around with it though. To this day, it’s my favorite piece of software that’s not a game (or is it?!).
But hey, I’m working on something again right now, and I’m sure this time I’ll keep at it, at least until the end of the week. Like most of my ideas, it’s amazingly niche and unmarketable: a smutty piece of AIF with card-based deck building mechanics. Oh well, I’m sure my other main project, an oldschool Hogan’s Heroes fan fiction puzzle fest, is going to set the IF world on fire one day!
Anyway. I’ve been lurking on this ridiculously addictive, helpful and fun-to-read forum since the days when most discussions were still taking place on the newsgroups, made an account sometime in 2015, and I’m happy I’m now finally writing my introduction post. A good day to you all!