Most 'productive' authors on IFDB

General IF Community Resources
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I am aware that quantity is not quality - note the quotation marks in the title :slight_smile: . Still I think it was interesting to investigate which authors have made most games according to IFDB. You can interpret it any way you want. Personally, I intend to play at least one game by all 10 authors except the Italian games by Max Di Bello as I don’t understand Italian.

I had to do it in a manual way without going too slow through the 12000+ games on IFDB so my method is only accurate for games with 40+ games.

MOST ‘PRODUCTIVE’ AUTHORS ON IFDB (most games):

[Anonymous(210) / Unknown(293): 503 games]
David Whyld:      62 games
Max Di Bello:     55 games
D.B.T:            53 games
Paul Allen Panks: 46 games
Emily Short:      45 games
Andrew Schultz:   44 games
Porpentine:       43 games
- - - - (some authors may be missing below) - - - -
Ryan Veeder:      39 games
Jack Lockerby:    35 games
Chandler Groover: 32 games
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I played Exile’s Rose by Anonymous recently. I liked it.

The very large output of games wakes me wonder if this prolific author keeps up the good writing style or if there will be low points throughout the collection of Anonymous’s work. The one game I did play so far has convinced me to look at more, and to keep an eye out for new stuff from this author.

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If you’re going to play a Panks game, I recommend “Westfront PC: The Trials of Guilder.” It’s by far his best game; he’s a bit of an acquired taste at best.

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These are mostly well-known authors. Even so, I had no idea they had THAT many games.

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:smile:
Joking aside, there can be several gems by unknown authors. E.g. Adam Cadre has removed his name from various games.

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I often have considered trying WestFront PC but never got around it. I understand it is a huge game with about 1700 locations so I consider playing the c64 or vic-20 versions as they are probably smaller but similar game play?
(And I like retro-computing)

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I know you’re already familiar with David Whyld, but my favorite game of his is The Reluctant Resurrectee, where you play as a disembodied eyeball hopping around a table:

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David Whyld’s last game on IFDB was released in 2014. His game count is even more impressive when you realize that his first game was released in 2001 (the only one that year). He also only released one title in 2014. That means the remaining 60 titles were released from 2002-2013. That’s 5 games per year during that time, or nearly one every two months.

If you want something even more insane, every one of Max Di Bello’s 55 games were released in either 1986 or 1987. That’s a new game every 13 days. I suppose he must have died from exhaustion in 1987, which is why we haven’t heard anything since.

I must be searching incorrectly for D.B.T. because it isn’t coming up for me on IFDB.

As for Paul Allen Panks, his spread of 46 games is in between 1993 and 2007. That’s a bit more sedate pace of roughly 3 games a year, which is a bit more close to the norm of current active authors, he just kept it up for 15 years.

Emily Short has a spread between 2000 and 2018 for 45 games. That’s about 1 every 5 months, or roughly 5 games every two years, although she has a spread even further than Paul Allen Panks.

Anyway, with the exception of D.B.T. that I failed searching for, the top 5 most prolific authors on IFDB have collectively not released a game in 5 years, most in a decade or more.

With Andrew Schultz still actively releasing and only 1 game behind Emily Short, he could take first place soon. His years with releases range from 2011 to 2022 with 44 games. That’s about one game every three months. His last releases were on October 31st, 2022. So if that average holds out, he should hit 63 games in 1,892 days after his last release. This would be a Wednesday, specifically January 5th, 2028. Sooner if he keeps his 2022 pace of 7 games/year. That’d be 991 days after latest release or Friday, July 18th, 2025.

So, in short, I predict Andrew will become the King of IFDB sometime between July 18th, 2025 and January 5th, 2028.

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Truly @aschultz has a lot to answer for.

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We’ve got 76 Bonaventura di Bello adventures listed at CASA and I still think that our listing is missing about a third of his adventures.

He made a new game in 2018. :wink:

*Note… the games are by Bonaventura di Bello not Max di Bello, as far as I’m aware. Max is his brother.

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I’d say IFDB misses out a few very prolific authors, such as Steve W. Lucas that we have credited for 40 games; and that’s after combining some of the very similar titles together. Quantity isn’t, of course, an indication of… well, that other Q.

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I guess @aschultz better get more busy than he realized!

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DBT is David B. Taylor, by the way…
http://solutionarchive.com/list/author%2C3553/

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Well, that’d be roughly 114 games. Subtract the 44 Andrew’s already got down, and that’s 71 to go. If he keeps up his 2022 7 games/year pace (and di Bello continues to stay quiet since his last release 5 years ago) that’d be December 23rd, 2032 to pass him up!

What do you say, @aschultz ? Think you can keep up 7 games/year for a decade?

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Looking forward to the thrilling sequellion, Thirtyfourbillionthreehundredfiftyninemillionsevenhundredthirtyeightthousandthreehundredsixtyeightia Gets Eightysixed.

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Thanks for the recommandation! Sounds like a fun game I hope to play soon. I think David Whyld has a talent for comedy. I see that I have only rated two of his games. My favorite so far is “Trick or Treat” which also is a comedy with lots of puzzles.

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That’s a lot of interesting statistics @pinkunz .

You must have overlooked a few of his games. Trick or Treat was released in 2017 and was made with Adrift 4. He has announced he is working on an Adrift 5 game right now, hopefully in time for ParserComp this year.

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It seems that games from type-in magazines rarely make it to IFDB. Personally I may have had some ignorant assumption that type-in games may not be that good because they would probably be very short etc but there are probably a lot of good ones out there I suppose.

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VS

(For some reason when turned into a link, the search field replaces the space between David’s first and last name with a “+”. Just turn it back to a space and rerun the search.)

I used the first search based off of David Whyld’s IFDB profile. Trick or Treat isn’t included. Looking further, simply searching via author name (author:David Whyld) reveals this result (as well as his 2015 game Meld). I suspect his two most recent games are not linked to his profile.

I’m not sure why that is the case. His profile shows activity as of today. Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to it.

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More often than not, someone else than the author added the game to IFDB. Often they forget to link it to profiles and not all authors have a profile.

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