Come with us on a informative and (hopefully) entertaining history of interactive fiction and graphic adventures — from the first text adventure designed for the PDP-10 mainframe (ADVENT, later Adventure, later Colossal Cave), through the text adventure heyday of Adventure International and Infocom, and into the Sierra On-Line and LucasArts era of the graphic adventures. We’ll explore the birth of the industry, its heyday, its decline, and its modern “rebirth”. We’ll also take a look at some of the more amusing aspects of the genre, including a few “Guide Dang It!” moments, Zarf’s Cruelty Scale of Interactive Fiction, and some fun games of “Guess the Verb”. And all this in less than an hour. Wish us luck.
While other children learned to spell in school, David Uspal got a head start by playing the text adventure game series by Scott Adams on his Commodore VIC-20. Thanks in part to this (and the idea that if he’s going to spend so much time on computers, he might as well get paid for it), Dave graduated from Penn State with a degree in Computer Science and is now a library technology developer for Falvey Library, Villanova University. Dave still keeps up with the latest trends in text and graphic adventuring, although sadly his early works on the VIC-20 have been lost to time (and faulty cassette storage).
About the presenterDavid K Uspal
David Uspal is a member of the Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library Technology Development Team, which works to create and implement technology that make research easier for faculty, students and staff. The Technology Team’s main function is the design and development of major features for the Falvey Memorial Library web site, accomplished via a mix of open source technology and custom built applications and is involved in many library community open source projects.