The IF Competition was held in October of 1995 on the Usenet groups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. The challenge was to create a short text adventure -- ideally, one which a player could finish in two hours. Authors could enter games created with either TADS or Inform, the two most popular and most portable text adventure creation systems.
This is a collection of the TADS entries, together with the interpreter needed to run them on the Macintosh. (Actually, some new versions have been released since the competition, so not all of these games are actually the versions that were voted on. But the changes are mostly bug fixes and improved description, not design changes.)
There are six games in this folder:
Toonesia (by C. J. T. Spaulding aka Jacob Weinstein)
A Night at the Museum Forever (by Chris Angelini)
Undo (by Null Dogmas aka Neil Demause)
Undertow (by Stephen Granade)
The One That Got Away (by 'The Author' aka Leon Lin)
Uncle Zebulon's Will (by Magnus Olsson)
The six TADS ".gam" files are the games themselves. Double-click on one of the games to run it. Some of the games also have introduction files (which you should read first), or walkthrough solution files (which you should only read if you want to cheat.)
The "Tads Run-Time 2.2" is the program which actually executes the game files. If you run it, it will just prompt you for a game file to run.
The Official FTP Site of the IF Competition is "ftp.gmd.de" (look in the directory "if-archive".) This site has everything a text-adventure fanatic needs: adventure creation tools (including TADS and Inform), interpreters to run various games on many different systems, articles on adventure design, and a multitude of games in many formats, both short and full-length.
The competition was organized by Gerry Kevin Wilson, for which we all give thanks.
Distribution notes: All of these games are freeware. However, they are not public domain. If you want to ask permission to include these games on commercial software CDs, you will have to contact the authors of the games individually. See the help information included with or inside each game.
