Inform, by Graham Nelson, an Englishman who first put it out in 1993. Inform turns a game you've written into a story file in the very same format Infocom used for its own games. That means the little programs people have written to play the old Infocom files will play the new Inform games too. (I use one called Frotz. There are versions for nearly every computer.)

TADS, the Text Adventure Development System, by Mike Roberts, which goes back to the late eighties. It has its own format and its own program to run the games, and some of the very best new games are written in it.

Both cost nothing. Both come with manuals far better than most of the software manuals that cross my desk at work. I've been teaching myself Inform on my lunch hours since February. I am writing a small game set in a public library after closing time. It is about a third done. Please don't hold your breath, but if you hear the date stamp move by itself, you'll know where it came from.

Graham Nelson wrote Curses (1993) to show what Inform could do, and it showed. You start out in the attic of your family's rambling old house, looking for a tourist map of Paris, and you end up somewhere, and somewhen, else entirely. It's enormous and clever and very English, and its puzzles are as hard as anything in Spellbreaker. Allow a winter. It was the game that told a lot of us that the old kind of game wasn't over.

Every fall since 1995, there has been a competition for new interactive fiction. Anyone can enter, the games have to be short enough to play in about two hours, and anyone who plays them can vote. It is the best thing that has happened to these games since Infocom. Every year it turns up a few writers nobody had heard of, and the next year everybody has.

The winners so far:

This year's entries come out in the fall, and I've already cleared my evenings for them. I'll post my favorites here once the votes are counted.

And a small surprise from the old guard: in 1997 Activision gave away a brand-new little Zork game for free, Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, written by Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn, two of Infocom's original authors. It's short, and silly, and it felt like getting a letter from an old friend.

Every game on this page, and Inform and TADS and Frotz, can be found on the Interactive Fiction Archive, a big FTP site in Germany that the whole community keeps up. Your web browser can open an FTP site just like a page.

For conversation, the newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction for playing, and rec.arts.int-fiction for writing. They're friendly, and remarkably patient with beginners, which is more than I can say for most of Usenet.

For reviews, SPAG, the Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games, which has been reviewing the new games, carefully and with good manners, for years.