The TextFire Hoax

"What TextFire has done, I think, is to make it clear that the best reason for enforcing anonymity
in the Annual Short I-F Competition is not to protect the first-timers, but to entertain us."
-- Den of Iniquity


On April 3rd, 1998, the maintainer of the IF Archive posted a routine "Recent Additions to the Interactive Fiction Archive" article to the newsgroups. Among the list of new arrivals was this entry:

ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/demos/12pack.zip
   the TextFire 12-Pack, the first in a series of annual demonstration
   packages by TextFire, Inc.
   This package contains demos of the following games:
   Inform:
      Revenge of the Killer Surf Nazi Robot Babes from Hell
      Bad guys
      An Exploration of Colour
      Flowers for Algernon
      Once: A Fable for the Lost
      Zugzwang: The Interactive Life of a Chess Piece
   TADS:
      Coma! An Interactive Action Thriller
      The U.S. Men's Hockey Team Olympic Challenge!
      The Inanimator
      Insomnia
      Jack's Adventures, or
         On The Run In Fairyland with a Golden Goose and a Magic Guitar
      Operate! An interactive adaptation of the popular parlor game
      Pumping!
      A Tenuous Hold
      Verb!
   Hugo:
      Will The Real Marjorie Hopkirk Please Stand Up? An Assassin's
      Nightmare!

So people downloaded the "demo" games, started playing them, and quickly realized that something was awry. Several somethings, in fact.

  1. Where did 14 new authors of IF come from? A freak wormhole? No one knew any of them, and none of them had ever been seen posting to rec.games.int-fiction or rec.arts.int-fiction.
  2. The readme file for the TextFire 12-Pack mentioned, among other tall claims, that it would have a booth at the "First Annual Festival of Interactive Fiction". This was the first anyone else in the IF community had heard of such an event.
  3. The TextFire authors' bios were just a tad..well, silly. Certain bits of them were also suspiciously reminiscent of certain ifMUD regulars.
  4. The games claimed to be demos for full-length games to come, but few of them played like demos. Most of them left the players wondering what more could possibly be done with the subject matter.

    Soon an all-out, free-for-all inquisition had begun, with every author from Graham Nelson to the infamous Rybread Celsius accused of complicity. I'll let you find out the rest for yourself. Below are some links to postings made during that time, to other related information, and to the games themselves.


    On April 28th, Scott Starkey posted a pointer to TextFire's official homepage on r.g.if. It is written from the point of view of an insider and has lots of fun behind-the-scenes info, including a more complete timeline which shows both sides of the experience.


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