Dear Friends,
Please ensure that your fine china is strapped down and your loved ones are securely packed in sawdust as we issue the seismic bulletin that ParserComp submissions close in a mere 26 days time, on Sunday 29th June!!* [*correct at the time of writing on 3rd June; certainly out of date by the time you’re reading this].
We can’t begin to say how thrilled Christopher is to be back as co-organiser of the competition, having missed it last year when, just days before the festivities were about to commence, @fos1 generously presented him with a one-way ticket to Flodaigh, Outer Hebrides, helped him to pack his things, drove him to the docks, saw him onto the steamer, and watched all the way as he sailed out of sight. After a year of sleeping in a ditch and surviving on grass and sparrows’ eggs, a lucky chance saw a passing ship pick him up and return him to more familiar shores and, eventually, like a homing pigeon, he found his way back to ParserComp HQ (despite fos1 having moved to a new secret underground bunker, in a different state, in the intervening time – you should have seen his face when Christopher walked in the door!)
Anyway, things have now settled back into their familiar routine: fos1 spends most of his time in the cryogenic chamber beneath the volcano, feeding lithium to the ParserComp supercomputer in preparation for the superhuman number-crunching task it will be presented with in a few short weeks’ time, Christopher potters around the mansion, polishing the silver and brushing the goldfish, and both are looking forward to whatever inexpressible delights are to be served up on the heavenly digital smorgasbord that is ParserComp 25.
If you haven’t yet signed up on the itch.io page, begun writing a game, vaguely thought over the possibility of throwing something together, or even realised that entering the competition is absolutely mandatory, then it’s time to cancel the foreign holiday and send the dog to the kennels so you can get cracking and focus fully on this most vital of tasks: writing a text game for ParserComp.
For those battle-hardened old lags familiar with the competition from years gone by (you know who you are) we should point out that there are one or two changes for this year: ‘Classic’ is now the sole category for entries (as we found the entries in the rather looser ‘Freestyle’ category just too radical and confusing – you kids can take your so called ‘pop music’ elsewhere; we prefer to listen to Beethoven), voting will now be done via a Google form rather than through itch.io’s uncompromisingly user-unfriendly built-in voting system, and there is a rule against the use of AI to write games (when the rest of humanity is, finally and inevitably, subsumed within the great AI gestalt, we here at ParserComp shall remain a last bastion of independent human endeavour!)
[For those of you new to the competition, past conditions are of no relevance and you are obliged simply to accept what we serve up this year as ‘normality’.]
We do hope that all of the above is enough to persuade you to enter the competition (how could it not?) but in the unlikely circumstance that further inducement is necessary then I only need to remind you of the fabulous prize(s) to be won, in the form of ParserComp’s legendary, priceless, inestimable, much coveted, and mysteriously magnetic [to be confirmed]*.
*we’ve no clue yet what it will be. Quite possibly whatever we can find in the cupboard under the stairs/garage.
We’re looking forward to whatever makes it through the gate at the end of the month!
With all best wishes,
fos1 and Christopher
