I’ve been doodling with IF for decades now, though very far from the IF mainstream. Like many old-timers around here, I got bowled over by the revolutionary original Adventure in early 1980s. Then I discovered expansions of the game: first Luckett’s and Pike’s Adventure II (a.k.a.Adv440), then Platt’s Adventure 3 (a.k.a. Adv550). Having peeped at the source of Platt’s version, I was amazed to discover a language (an actual language!) for writing IF, instead of the rather more impenetrable combination of custom Fortran code plus a database file. That was A-code and I fell in love.

I promptly used A-code to merge Adventure II and Adventure 3 on company’s Prime mini-computers. This was Adventure 4 (later enhanced and released to the world as Adventure4+), while also adding features to Platt’s language. The more I worked with the language, the more intrigued I was by the possibilities of some of its unusual features. So I kept working on exploring their potential and that was one of the motivations for starting in 1998 what turned out to be a five year project of writing the 770 point expansion Adv770.

So it’s fair to say that my interest in IF is largely restricted to A-code. I am no good as a player of IF games – far too interested in looking under the hood and, a contrary soul as I can be, very often finding myself out of sympathy with what I find there. But I am also interested in preserving IF history and did my best in assisting with recovering original implementation code of both Adventure II and Adventure 3. I also assisted with recovery and analysis of Mike Goetz’s Adv580 (having discovered that it was also written in A-code).