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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Plotkin has released a few IF games for iPhone http://zarfhome.com/ He has a new one coming out soon, Hadean Lands. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter... He wrote his own interface for playing IF games on phones. It's called IosFismo and it's open-source, if you want to make your own text-based game for iOS. https://github.com/erkyrath/iosfizmo/

Edit: Some of those games are also playable online. The browser-based IF interpreter is called Parchment, and it's open-source too. https://code.google.com/p/parchment/

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Back in 2000, I was working at a startup, and one of our rabbit trails was an IF interpreter for z-machine games on mobile phones. At that time, you could count on about 4 to 6 lines of text to be visible on a phone at any one time, and text input was horrendously tedious. Our founder approached Andrew Plotkin about licensing his games, and he was reportedly "kind of a dick" about it. Considering the source, that might have been projection.

I shudder to think of what might have happened if that company actually turned a profit from something, and this thing in particular.

Hey. This is me. I hope I was not that much of a dick, but at that point I wasn't interested in making money off old IF. I don't remember the specific incident, though.

(I'm still not very interested in making money off old IF, although I've tried a bit of that. The Hadean Lands plan is to charge money for a new game which has never been released before.)

Other notes: we also have a Boston IF meetup group (http://pr-if.org/).

The term "interactive fiction" dates from the early 80s, actually. Infocom used it in their ads with the general theme of "We're more serious and important than mere videogames." The term has been tussled back and forth over the years; these days it's more of an umbrella term than a niche.

I think you probably weren't a dick. You just said no to someone who was very accustomed to getting what he wanted.

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