Retro No More: Interactive Fiction of the Early Comp Era

In 2002, Paul O’Brian, a prolific author, reviewer, and commentator on the contemporary interactive-fiction scene, attempted to compile a list of those people who had done the most to help text adventures live on beyond the death of Infocom. Among the names he listed were those of Mike Roberts and Graham Nelson, the creators of TADS and Inform; Andrew Plotkin, who contributed crucial technical innovations of his own and authored a number of perplexing, intriguing games; and Adam Cadre, who wrote the single most-played text adventure of the post-Infocom era. None of these names will come as a surprise to anyone who has been even a casual tourist of the interactive-fiction scene over the years. But another of them very well might: that of Gerry Kevin “Whizzard” Wilson. And yet one can make an argument that his skill set was the most unique and thus the most essential of them all.

It will presumably come as a shock to no one when I write that those folks who were still happy to play games consisting of nothing but text in the era of multimedia and 3D tended to be as quiet and bookish as the games themselves. Such personality types are not overly known for their organizing or marketing acumen. The burgeoning interactive-fiction community was thus incredibly lucky to have Wilson, who was the exception to the rule of introversion. An Infocom superfan who just couldn’t bear to see text adventures go gentle into that good night, he became an activist and community organizer par excellence.

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