I discovered Inform 7 last year and was impressed at the sophisticated platform it provides for writing interactive fiction in semi-natural English. In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers, and I learned a lot about programming Acorn computers from Peter Killworth's "How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron". So to give Inform 7 a try, I implemented the mini four-room adventure from that book, and wrote a walk-through of how to do it quite neatly with the building blocks of Inform 7 here in case anyone's interested: https://www.eclecticstacks.com/post/mini-adventure-in-inform...
> In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers
Indeed. Adventure games were the most sophisticated games around. Companies like Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls ruled the roost. Teenagers like myself aspired to one day work there, which for me was a major reason to go and study AI (which was mostly parsers and tree walks at the time).
And then along came iD software. One day I walked into the shared computer facility of my university and everybody was playing Castle Wolfenstein and I remember thinking: o shit...
Fortunately AI did not turn out to be such a bad choice after all.
