Games - Paul Allen Panks (55 results)

Paul Panks (1976-2009)(also known as Dunric) was an enthusiast for old computers, old computer games and especially text adventures. He is credited with having created dozens of such games during the 1990s and the 2000s. Most of his games are, compared to their contemporaries, rather simple: In the days of powerful development tools like Inform or TADS, he stuck to his home-grown VERB NOUN parser written in BASIC. Decades after the commercial death of that particular system, he wrote new games for the C64. Many of his games could be solved within about ten turns. On the other hand, his magnum opus Westfront PC boasted several thousand locations, an RPG like combat system and a large set of characters carrying a convoluted plot.

He had a very special relationship with the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. Between 2004 and 2007, he had the questionable honour of placing last three times. In some of these years, he also had other games running which placed near the bottom as well. The response to his games in general and these in particular was very negative, but that never seemed to stop him from trying again.

Paul generally had a very tough standing in the modern-day IF community. His games were mostly panned or ignored due to the aforementioned technological and gameplay-related choices. His attempt to promote some of his ideals by organising a minimalist game competition had to be put to sleep with its second iteration when it received close to no response at all.

In July 2009, Paul died unexpectedly - a few days short of his 33rd birthday, leaving a legacy not only of his games, but he will also be remembered for some very nice and nostalgic, but also some less than harmonic discussions on newsgroups and web forums.