The | 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.
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.