Marvellously encylopedic game credits/info site MobyGames has also been known to run feature stories on occasion, and has just posted a detailed multi-part article called 'Something about Interactive Fiction', a neat overview which starts by citing Jason Bergman's fun IF Quake April Fool's joke.

Author Terrence Bosky then makes an important point: "Interactive fiction games respond to natural language input. In his book Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Nick Montfort points out that interactive fiction games recognize player input on two levels: Within the game world, and within the realm of the game as a program (saving your game or restoring it, for example)."

We then wander through many of the usual touchstones (Info-who?), before ending on this fun note: "Asked if he was surprised by the continued interest in Adventure, Don Woods said, “No, I'm not surprised. It spawned a large and active industry, and people in the areas of adventure games and interactive fiction keep looking back to see what else can be learned from the early successes. If anything, I'm occasionally surprised by the reverse: in the past few years I have begun encountering computer professionals who have NOT heard of Adventure. That used to be quite rare!”"

Nonetheless, it's still all about the spelunking, right? (Pictured above - Don Woods accepting the First Penguin Awards at this year's Game Developers Choice awards on behalf of himself and Will Crowther for creating Adventure - the award was presented by Infocom veterans Steve Meretzky and Bob Bates in full cave gear! Oh, and completely offtopic, while Googling to find this, we found out what IGN did at GDC this year. And people accuse them of being lowbrow!)