Indygamer was kind enough to point out that Chris Crawford's much-fabled new Storytron system has gone Beta, albeit with some bug-hacking still in progress.

As blogger Paul Eres notes: "For those not familiar with Chris Crawford, he founded the GDC, wrote the first book on game design, and created successful games for early personal computers, the Atari 2600, and the Mac, only to eventually leave game development for the more experimental enterprise of interactive storytelling."

Eres adds: "Storytron may be difficult to understand. And, lacking a significantly sized demo storyworld it's hard for the casual observer to see what makes this engine any different from real-time multiple choice games like Masq, but I think it's something to keep an eye on or even play around with."

I think the point here is meant to be a Web 2.0-ish creation and exchange of stories in a much more fluid and complex manner, and it'll be interesting to see if it's possible, given the tortuous history of the project. Looks like many bugs are still being worked on.