Over at Gamasutra today, one of our quirkier interview pieces - chatting to David Cornelson of Textfyre, a new startup that "intends to target a young audience with regular episodic [text adventure] titles featuring reoccurring characters, with the first game expected near the end of the year." That's right, someone is trying out commercial interactive fiction once more - an eyebrow-raising prospect.

Cornelson talks about a bunch of cool hypotheticals related to if he ever got hold of the Zork or Harry Potter licenses, but here's his main pitch for his company's distribution plan: "We’re going to use simple DVD cases with a full color cover, a 10 page full color comic book, instructions, and a full color labeled installation CD. We will also offer downloadable versions and possibly versions to play online. We’re also going to seriously look at adapting our games to the mobile PDA market, but that’s a long term strategy. There are other packages I like better, but they’re more expensive. We plan to do “feelies” when it’s obvious."

Interestingly, Cornelson sees his pitch as competing with Young Adults fiction on bookshelves: "Yes. If you look at the Young Readers section, you’ll see numerous series-based fiction. These books are enormously popular and some of them have dozens of books. I think the market that is attracted to these books is my target market."

Specific authors aren't mentioned in the piece, but Grand Text Auto spills the beans in a recent news story: "Michael Gentry (Anchorhead, Little Blue Men) was the first IF author to join up with Textfyre, as a writer... Ian Finley (Babel, Kaged) has joined to do world and game design... Jon Ingold (All Roads, Muldoon) will write a game for Textfyre." These are 'names' in the IF world, and it's going to be highly interesting to see how the outside world will react to their fiction.