Vacation Gone Awry

[Mr Creosote]

http://solutionarchive.com/game/id,4542 ... +Awry.html

Fredrik, maybe you can clear up how you managed to write a game in Inform in 1988? I don't think the language existed until the early 90s.

[Gunness]

He just forgot to add the "time travel" tag

[FredrikR]

It's complicated...

We've discussed what year to put on the game. We designed and implemented it on the C64 in 1987-88, using an adventure authoring system which we created ourselves, called Rabies. We sent it out to testers, and had something kind of ready for release, but we felt that we needed to fix some details before release. In 2001, we were done fixing the details, and so we released it. Between 1988 and 2001, we ported Rabies and the game first to the Amiga and then to MS-DOS, started implementing the game in TADS, started implementing it in Inform 5, switched over to Inform 6, added stuff, took stuff away, etc.

So: We did put out a version for testing in 1988, but it wasn't written in Inform. That version was probably only seen by a handful of people. In the copyright message for the 2001 release, we wrote Copyright 1988-2001, which I think isn't all wrong, since we do claim copyright for the test release in 1988 as well. This led several different sites to set 1988 as the year of initial release. Since the game was initially designed in 1987-1988, I think it's more fair in a way to say it's a game from 1988 than to say it's a game from 2001.

Possibly, we should add C64 as a platform. Since Rabies was only used for this single game, adding it as a development system seems like overkill.

[Mr Creosote]

Interesting... that would make a good synopsis text, wouldn't it?

[FredrikR]

I don't know how to put it in a way that's appropriate for a synopsis text. Feel free to add it yourself if you like, or hand me a suggestion if you prefer.

Maybe we can dig out the C64 game and release it at some point. As you may have guessed, it was called Stranded, and that was the title of the Inform game as well, until just before release, when we discovered that someone else had released a TADS game called Stranded.

[darius]

How about 'Designed on the C64 in 1988 and implemented (and expanded) in Inform in 2001'?

[Gunness]

I thought the backstory was quite interesting, so I added the majority of it

As to the other "Stranded" - which one is it? We have one in our database, but IFDB lists another one. Also from 2001, also written in TADS but with a different author and no mention of the IF Comp.

[FredrikR]

I usually find this kind of story behind a game interesting when I find it about other people's games, so it's probably a good idea to put it in there.

Jim Bayers' game was the one that prompted us to change the title.

/Fredrik