Games - Quill, The/AdventureWriter (839 results)

The Quill was created by Graeme Yeandle in 1983 and was published by Welsh software house Gilsoft. Various support programs were created over the years which added extra features; The Press, the Patch and the Illustrator. The Quill was the first in the "Gilsoft family" of adventure systems which includes the PAW, the SWAN, and DAAD.

Localised versions were published by Norace in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, all on one disc/tape.

In the USA, the tool was sold, under license, as AdventureWriter by the publisher CodeWriter who included their own graphics system. CodeWriter "grey imported" a French language version to Europe.

Gilsoft's Quill was available for ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, BBC Micro & Acorn Electron, Sinclair QL, and Oric 1/Atmos. An Atari 800/XL version was developed but may not have been released.

CodeWriter's (US & French) version of the system was available for Commodore 64, Atari 800 and XL series computers with 48K, Apple II (II, II+, IIc) / Franklin Ace 1000, and IBM-PC (MS-DOS). The C64 and Apple/Franklin version had support for graphics.

Although The Quill only had a two-word parser, a special four-word version was created by Gilsoft for CRL to use in their Bugsy game; although the commercially released version does not seem to implement that feature. Support for four word inputs could be added to Spectrum games by the use of the third-party The Fix program that was marketed by Kelsoft.

In addition to the commercial games produced using the Quill, several games used the system as a prototyping/development tool (such as Dodgy Geezers and Terrormolinos).

There were also games released using (often uncredited) heavily-modified versions of the Quill such as Rigel's Revenge and The Serf's Tale. That particular hack of the Quill, produced by Smart Egg, was dubbed "The Ballpoint".

The Quill influenced many other adventure systems that followed it. It has also been unofficially ported to other platforms. For example, in the early 2000s Zeljko Juric produced an enhanced version for Texas Instruments (TI) programmable graphical calculators. There was an unofficial ZX81 version in development back in 2009/2010 together with a Windows-based editor.