Edge Cases

A Programmer and a Puzzler

Andrew Pontious along with Wolf Rentzsch talks about Andrew’s experiences with text adventure games: a bit of their history, what it was like to develop them, and his eventual deal-breaking frustration with puzzles.

Links:

• Mork & Mindy « Wikipedia
• Their Job Is to Break It « Edge Cases
• Interactive fiction « Wikipedia
• Zork « Wikipedia
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (video game) « Wikipedia
• Colossal Cave Adventure « Wikipedia
• Myst « Wikipedia
• Infocom « Wikipedia
• Sierra Online « Wikipedia
• Inform
• TADS, the Text Adventure Development System
• Infocom - Zork Downloads
• The Interactive Fiction Archive
• Interactive Fiction Competition
• XYZZY Awards
• intfiction.org, the Interactive Fiction Community Forum
• A MUD Forever Voyaging
• Brass Lantern, the Adventure Game Website: Beginner Resources
• C4[1] Robert Andersen: Icon Intermission

Rejected Episode Titles:

• No, That’s Not It
• Like a Leaden Weight
• Something from My Past, My Mysterious Past
• GO WEST
• Why People Don’t Love Us
• Violence Isn’t the Answer to This One
• A Certain Amount of Guess-the-Verb
• Very Siri-Like
• The Siracusa Argument
• My Inherent Skepticism
• A Bajillion Verbs That You Could Choose
• You Will Be Eaten by a Grue
• Let’s Say You Have a Kazoo
• Getting the Ambience Straight
• Typing in the Same Verb Two Hundred Times
• Deflating the Stakes a Bit
• Actually Part of the Problem
• Kind of Being a Smart-Ass
• More Like Debugging Than Programming
• That Is Show Business
• I Believe You Called It a Wasteland