IF

Interactive Fiction games have their origins in days when computers were far less powerful than they now are.  Such systems were only able to run very cheesy video games.  These were sad times indeed for proto-gaming-geeks everywhere.

But all was not lost!  A few brave programmers began writing games that handled this problem by describing the game world in language.  Thus, were text adventures born...

Then, something terrible happened.  Computers' computational abilities got faster!  The technological explosion made games like King's Quest and Ultima possible, and ultimately lead to Wolf 3-D and Quake.  Poor text adventure games couldn't compete, not even by calling themselves "Interactive Fiction" to appeal to bookworms.

Although the technological explosion continues to this day, resulting in dazzling video games like Halo and Portal, an underground movement has kept the IF tradition alive and flourishing.  Not satisfied with the audio-visual spectacle of mainstream gaming, and burning with the desire to make their own games, these people...  well, you get the point.

If you're completely new to IF, the idea is that you type in words saying what you want to do, and the game tells you what happened.

People

The Organizer of Meta-Comp is Conrad Cook, the (ahem) proud author of the notoriously buggy game LAIR of the CyberCow.  He assures people that his motivation in organizing the Meta-Comp is really *not* to make up for inflicting LAIR on them...

You can find some of Conrad's IF-related stuff online at http://misc.conradcook.net.

Other People - If you have skills you'd like to contribute to the Meta-Comp project, that's great!  Please write in to the email address listed in the banner...