My interactive fiction archive 2004-2019

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I’m putting a massive 372 MB zip-file online which contains more or less all of my Interactive Fiction related creations of the period 2004-2019. All my completed games, with source code and assorted extra files; all of my abandoned, incomplete games; reviews and essays; backups of my blog, my IFDB reviews and my forum posts. I will also upload this to the IF Archive, since the archive’s administrators have told me that they do accept such collections.

What is the purpose of this archive? Partly it is to safeguard a very small but I hope not entirely insubstantial part of IF history, so that future ‘digital antiquarians’ can look for whatever they might then be looking for – even if sites like the IFDB or Blogger go offline. Partly it is for those of you who are curious to delve into some of the dusty corners of my IF directories and see, say, the somewhat impressive number of ATTACK-based I games I started and then quickly abandoned before I hit on the idea of make the roguelike that would be Kerkerkruip.

Probably the most relevant part of the release are the source codes to my completed games. Some of these were already available, but many were not. So whether it is The Baron or Terminal Interface that you are interested in, the source is here! (I’ll also be uploading these separately and linking to them from the IFDB at some later point.) What’s more, I am relaxing my source code licensing. In the past, I licensed my source code under the GPL; from today, I’m giving you the choice between GPL and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial, the latter of which might be more useful to some of you. (Since it does not require you to publish your own derivative source code under the same license.)

The archive’s main directory contains a file that serves as a table of contents, so please view that for further details. Have fun! (And perhaps consider doing the same thing, if you’re an author.)

Comments

  1. Devid Bell29 June 2019 at 05:33

    cc-by-nc is bad way. No freedom. cc-by is better. GPL is good too.

    ReplyDelete

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