Some very important, landmark games in text adventure history were magazine or book type-ins. And there are also plenty of not very good ones. 
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Very few of my games listed on IFDB were added by me, mainly because at first I wasnāt even aware it existed and later because, as someone else had kindly already listed them, it seemed easier to let them continue doing it (and also I wasnāt really sure how to go about adding them or linking them to my profile).
I probably should go through the list and add everything thatās missing as I can see a few other games that havenāt been included. I wrote another Inform game for the Intro Comp called Tales of the Soul Thief, then thereās a 1 room game called the Adventures of Postman Matt I wrote in Adrift a few years later.
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Man, Andrew is so hosed. (Seriously, though, thanks for popping in and very impressive list of games! Thatās quite the bibliography!)
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My mom is gonna be so thrilled when I tell her Iāve probably/possibly been included in a top ten list!
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Iām not sure why Max Di Bello is listed as the author of those Italian games. I have all those as being authored by Bonaventura di Bello. @8bitAG said that Max is his brother. Bonaventura has published at least 58 games for the ZX Spectrum and 71 games for the C64, though most of these are common to the two platforms. As such, that makes him one of the most prolific authors of all time. His ZX Spectrum games were written using The Quill and his C64 games were written using AdventureWriter. The C64 games were published by Edizioni Hobby on the very popular Italian cassette magazines Explorer (3 games per monthly issue from November 1986 to November 1987) and Viking (3 games per monthly issue from January 1987 to December 1987). A couple have been republished in RetroMagazine.
His C64 contemporaries included Roberto Tabacco (51 games), Alessandro Zanello (45 games), Franco Toldi & Sandro Certi (joint authors of 15 games), Carlo Landolfo (6 games), Fabio Magini (6 games) and Enrico DāAmbrosio (3 games).
D.B.T. is David B. Taylor. He has written at least 57 games in QB64.
IFDB is hopelessly inadequate as an authoritative source of text adventures released in the 20th century. @8bitAG has already mentioned the very prolific Steve W Lucas. Others that spring to mind are Dorothy Millard (40 games) and the brilliant Peter Kirsch (26 games). Peter Kirschās games were published for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit and TRS-80, mostly by SoftSide Publications as part of the āAdventure of the Monthā subscription service.
Oh, and donāt ignore type-ins from books and magazines. I was brought up on those. A lot for the lesser-known computers are crap, but the early games for computers like the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, CoCo, TRS-80 et al set the trend for what we now know and love. Authors like Scott Adams and Brian Moriarty (Wishbringer & Trinity) cut their teeth on type-ins.
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Wow! This is comprehensive. Thanks for putting it together. TBH I havenāt thought much about who wrote the most games, as when I think too much about that, it distracts me from content. But itās cool to know. Perhaps it will be nice motivation to push that last one thatās in limbo into a publishable state.
Also it is cool to have a bunch of alerts to come back to and such a discussion to read.
All this actually helped me with my spring thing effort which stalled a bit. So yay there.
Itās so weird but somehow fitting that Paul Allen Panks and Emily Short have written almost the exact same number of games.
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Though CASA and IFDB have a lot of overlap, both sources are based on what users find interesting so they should not be taken as an authoritative sources on everything related but pretty good sources for some special corners of IF / text adventures. E.g. CASA only has 14 games by David Whyld, 16 by Ryan Veeder and so on.
As I do like a good old school two-word parser game (I love those by Scott Adams), perhaps you could recommend some of the best type-ins?
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Technically, I think both were written with The Quill (although the US C64 AdventureWriter is basically the same) as there are references to The Illustrator and The Quill is mentioned in interviews.
I think Max tends to be attributed to the games as some people donāt realise that Bonaventura is actually a real (fairly common) name! IFWiki has an article on Bonaventura, although a couple of the links are out of date; Bonaventura Di Bello - IFWiki
Also: Bonaventura Di Bello - Wikipedia
As well as the Spectrum and C64 Quilled games, there were BASIC-powered games for MSX. Iāve been putting off fixing and addressing the CASA entries on him for a whileā¦ Itās an incredibly complicated task for someone not fluent (or even basic) in Italian! 
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Oh, man. Thatās a tough call. Two-word parsers, tough puzzles and you can get killed in most of them. Hereās a few random games that spring to mind. You can find these on the archive sites for the relevant platforms. As I have a bias for Atari 8-bit games, letās start with those. (Some of the Atari games are also available for other platforms.)
Atari 8-bit
Adventure at Vandenburg A.F.B. by Tom Hudson
Adventure in the Fifth Dimension by Brian Moriarty
Castaway by Rick Graves
Castle Morgue by David Blease
Castle of Cire Nampahc by Eric Chapman
Crash Dive! by Brian Moriarty
Dedridge Castle by Linda Naysmith
Dr Livingston by Carl Russell et al
Escape from the Dungeon of the Gods by Ray Sato
The Hermit by Eric Bryant
House of Secrets by David Blease
Kidnapped by Peter Kirsch
Mister Scratch by Clayton Walnum (ported from the ST by me)
Nightshade by Clayton Walnum
One for the Road by Clayton Walnum
Operation: Sabotage by Ray Sato
Portrait Dungeon by Paul Coppins
Tower of Mystery by Gary McGath
The Treasures of Barboz by Chris Smith
Amstrad CPC
Witch Hunt by Mike Lewis & Simon Price
Apple II
Lost Dutchmanās Gold by Terry Kepner
Rollercoaster by David Lubar
Stoneville Manor by Randy Jensen
CoCo
Lighthouse Adventure by Chris Wilkinson
Polynesian Adventure by Don Dunlap
Search for the Ruby Chalice by Justin Paola
Skid Row Adventure by unknown
Treasures of Barsoom by unknown
Oric
Blackpool Tower by Darren Reynolds
System-100
Survival by Stewart F Rush
TRS-80
Arctic Adventure by Harry McCracken
Atlantean Odyssey by Terry Kepner
CIA Adventure by Hugh Lampert
Dog Star Adventure by Lance Micklus
Entry into King Tutās Tomb by Greg Hassett
The House of Seven Gables by Greg Hassett
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Greg Hassett
Lost Ship Adventure by Charles Forsythe
Sorcererās Castle by Greg Hassett
Voyage to Atlantis by Greg Hassett
VIC-20
The Holy Grail by Kevin Gardiner
ZX Spectrum
Castaway by Keith A Parrock
Venture 16 by A Clapham
Although not type-ins, I also highly recommend most the the SoftSide āAdventure of the Monthā series. The first one was āArabian Adventureā by Peter Kirsch. Search for that on CASA and youāll find the others listed under āRelatedā.
The series was later renamed to āSoftSide Adventure Seriesā. The first one was āThe Wizardās Swordā by Peter Kirsch. Search for that on CASA and youāll find the others under āRelatedā. All these are available for Apple II, Atari 8-bit and TRS-80.
The quality of these games is generally quite good, but theyāre really old school. If you canāt find something that you like amongst them, Iāll be surprised.
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Jason Dyer is doing a very good job at covering many of those early type-ins, alongside more famous commercial disk/tape releases, as part of his All the Adventures project; All the Adventures | Renga in Blue
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Great, this gives me a lot to choose from.
I realize that I have played at least one type-in game āArctic Adventureā which I enjoyed quite a lot. It was the online remastered version but my understanding is that it runs on a TRS-80 emulator so it is close to the original version.
I have also played a few Danish ones from a book but I thought most type-ins were from magazines and therefore very short but I see that at least āArctic Adventureā is from a book. But the magazine type-ins could of course also span serveral issues.
Also, it is incredible what can sometimes be squeezed into little space. The extreme example is the C64 IFComp entry Amazing Quest where the author decided to make a game where all the code could be seen on the screen! (40 columns, 25 rows)
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Though I knew āRenga in Blueā a bit, I did not realize that he also covered a lot of type-ins. Hope to look deeper into his blog in the near future.
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Most of the TRS-80 games that I listed started out as commercial games and were then printed in The Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures. Scott Adamsā Adventureland was also printed in that book, plus some others that were pretty terrible.
I only listed games that I have played and solved and memories of them have stayed with me. Another book that is very good is the Exploring Adventures on the xxx by Peter Gerard, but I havenāt played those yet.
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Yeah, as Garry says, the Captain 80 book was hugely influential in that those listings ended up getting unofficially adapted to various machines, such as the PET, Vic & C64, and distributed all over the world through the user group and public domain networksā¦ ending up being played by thousands of gamers over the next couple of decades and starting many an adventurerās journey.
The book is in the Internet Archive and you can see the full list of titles in this entry for Dog Star Adventure. :: CASA :: Dog Star Adventure
Iāve mentioned that one here in the past, as itās a really good example of how those early magazine & book listings were adapted, reprinted and republished over many years, for a whole range of different home computers. The DNA of those games, in terms of their adventure frameworks, are also in a whole host of other games.
The games in that book series have an interesting history too, as weāve discussed over on CASA, in that they came from an original game by Steven Darnold who was a littleā¦ well, shall we say tactfully, a littleā¦ surprised to see them included in a book published on the other side of the world. :: CASA :: Tunnelmaze Adventure
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Bringing things back to the original post, I notice that Spectrum adventure legend Jack Lockerby is on the list. As with some of the other text adventure authors included, he published his games across multiple formats. Often the ZX Spectrum (PAWed), C64 (Quilled) and ST (STACed) versions of the games were fairly different, so you could technically factor in a multiplier on his total to account for that.
Hereās a profile that I did on him a few years ago. Itās worth noting that Jack was over 60 when he first started writing his games, meaning that heās one of the few āinteractive fictionā authors for whom we could celebrate his centenary!
http://8bitag.com/info/river.html
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I guess Bounty Hunter is the best example: The ZX Spectrum version had 1500 locations arranged in a grid, whereas the C64 version had a ānormalā map with perhaps 50-100 locations.
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Yeah, itās not particularly one of my favourites of Jackās, but it does utilise features of the PAW that are beyond the earlier Quill. And, to be fair, probably the STAC (on the Atari ST) as Roger never completed his adaptation for that machine.
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Is this true? If it is, I honestly donāt know how people do it. What with everything else going on in my life it takes me three years to finish a game and some of mine have taken much, much longer. I look at these very prolific authors with a mixture of envy and wonder.
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I would say not all games are created equal, but many active authors join 2 or more of the major comps in a year. With that said, life happens and sometimes folks drop off the radar for months or years at a time.
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A game can consist of one puzzle or thirty, so itās not easy to say what the numbers mean without a closer look. They could be deeply implemented or not. And so forth. In terms of raw content and code, one personās five games might be anotherās two games. Or ten. Etc. Or, as in Panksās case (didnāt I see him mentioned earlier?) playtesting efforts may vary (no shade, I feel a lot of solidarity with Panks for reasons I wonāt explain).
Itās fun to think about, but I wouldnāt try to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
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