Category:Spanish

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History of Interactive Fiction in Spain

Background (1984-1988)

While in England and the United States, Interactive Fiction started to appear at the end of the 1970s and beginnings of the 1980s, in Spain we have to wait until 1984 to see the first text adventures. Dinamic, a company recently born by that time, but destined to become the most important one in Spain, premiered with two programs: Artist, a drawing application, and Yenght, the first spanish interactive fiction work, written in compiled BASIC and assembler for the Spectrum 48K, with brief descriptions and several bugs. It also had some sudden deaths. Anyway, it managed to amuse some players, who had a nice time with the game.

Other sources opine that the genuine influence were the copies of the mythical "Hobbit" by Melbourne House, mentioned by many IF writers, so this gives the impression that Yenght wouldn't be more than another obstacle in its development, because it wouldn't be until 1986 that another text adventure appeared (with the exception of "Alicia en el País de las Maravillas", distributed by a magazine, the mythical Microhobby, in 1985.

Those would be two of the greatest supports to the genre in its beginnings: the software company Dinamic and the magazine editor Hobby Press through its magazines MicroHobby and MicroMania. Dinamic founded a specific label (the AD label, "Adventures Dinamic") for publishing interactive fiction, with games created by small homegrown companies and those created by Adventures AD, a company from Valencia that soon would stand out over the rest. The games published at that time had a wide variety of genres and styles, from classical adaptations as "Don Quijote de la Mancha" to literary adaptations like "The birds from Bangkok" ("Los pájaros de Bangkok") with detective Pepe Carvalho by the writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban, or parodies of Star Wars like "The Crockery Wars" ("La guerra de las vajillas"), or even sci-fi games like "Megacorp". Interestingly enough, the other biggest game company in Spain, Topo Soft, never published a single text adventure in its whole existence.

Adventures AD and the First Golden Age (1988-1992)

The real take-off started in 1988 with the publishing of "The Original Adventure" ("La Aventura Original", the first launch of Adventures Ad, which was a free adaptation of "Adventure", combining the puzzles of the original game with some tweakings. The game was a sale success, and its massive distribution managed an increase of the hobbyists.

The other important seed of the popularity of text adventures in Spain was the avaliability of the parser PAWS. Quill could only be obtained in english, but Tim Gilberts was hired by Adventures AD, and together they launched a translated version of PAWS, sold to the spanish hobbyists, so they could write their own games. It originated an important raise in them, being years 1988 and 1989 the most popular, due to the call for a national text adventure writing contest by the most popular Spectrum magazine in Spain, MicroHobby, which included two permanent sections in every issue dedicated to text adventures, written by Andrés Samudio, the founder of AD.

Adventures AD could be seen, in some ways, as the "spanish Infocom". Between 1988 and 1992, Adventures AD would sell six different titles, each one of them a sale success, until the decline of the 8 bits market in 1992:

• La Aventura Original (The Original Adventure 1988). Free adaptation of "Adventure" by Crowther and Woods. It showed pictures in almost every location, and changed the original game by starting the game outside the cave, and forcing the player to find a way to open a grate and enter the cave (in the second part of the adventure - B side of the tape). Instead of starting with everyday elements and introducing the supernatural little by little, this version had an elf and a dwarf in the first section of the game.
• Jabato (1989). Based upon a character from a comic book, this game was set during the heyday of the Roman Empire. It's main novelty was that it allowed to play several characters simultaneously, which travelled through Europe and Africa.
• Cozumel (1990). The first title of the "Ci-u-Than Trilogy", set in the Caribbean during the first half of the 20th century. Their best game, according to many opinions. The explorer Doc Monro gets marooned in Cozumel island's coast, where he lives great adventures.
• La Aventura Espacial (Space Adventure 1990). It was written during a hiatus in the production of the "Ci-u-Than" trilogy. With a sci-fi setting, it had some experimental touch. It also allowed to control more than one character.
• Los Templos Sagrados (The Sacred Temples 1991). Second part of the "Ci-u-Than" trilogy. A game of transition, full of puzzles, also set in the caribbean rainforest.
• Chichén Itzá (1992). Third part of their trilogy, their most complete game to many people, with lots of NPC and settings. The most difficult moment arrived for the company, and also for Dinamic, due to the chrisis of the 8 bit computers and the arrival of graphic adventures.

All Adventures AD games had very simmilar attributes. They had two loads, and at the beginning of the second one it was necessary to write a password you obtained at the end of the first part. Pictures were present in almost every location. They were written with a parser called DAAD, which allowed to export the games to all the 8 and 16 bit platforms at that time. The 16 bit games were usually longer and had some harder puzzles.

For some time it was said that Adventures AD would start writing graphic adventures, but they never managed it. The activity from that point would be centered upon the amateur clubs, which were born at that time, and also quite active. In all games distributed by AD they showed also an advertisement promoting an amateur club, which of course helped in its take-off.

The two most important ones were CAAD, founded in Valencia in 1988 by Juanjo Muñoz, and Year Zero Club, founded in Vigo in 1991, being the most important member Fran Morell. These clubs had almost one thousand members, and lots of interesting articles in their fanzines. They also had advertisements and lists of homemade low-prize text adventures. The production of interactive fiction between 1986 and 1992, first golden age of the spanish text adventures, could easily reach 300 titles, due to the amateur games. From 1992 the hobbyist activity fell significantly, and soon afterwards, paper fanzines stopped being published.

Internet and the Second Golden Age (1997-)

Some years later, the arrival of Internet gave birth to a second golden age, in which the aficionados could participate through mail lists, several web pages like CAAD webpage as a reference, and an IRC channel. The CAAD webpage was born in 1997, with little resources at the beginning, and a labour of retrieval of the information appearing in the paper fanzines and the old text adventures being turned into emulator files. A newsgroup was tried to be made, just like the english-spoken ones, but it was soon invaded by Spam and questions about graphic adventures, so finally the mail list was used instead, currently in Yahoogroups.

In 1997, the two existing clubs organized a text adventure competition, in which less than twelve adventures were entered. In 1998, CAAD repeated the competition, and obtains the participation of 9 text adventures, though the genre was still in chrisis, and a winner was not voted until 3 years later.

At the ending of 1999 the first brief interactive fiction competition appeared, which supposed the take-off of this second golden age. It had a lot of success, and in may of 2000 a second edition took place. The organisation of several other competitions like these (in the first competition a severe limit of just one location and three objects was established, though it was removed in other editions) helped to rebirth the interest of aficionados, which became again interested in the genre also with the help of the IRC channel and the mail list. Some of these competitions had some variations: comedy interactive fiction, experimental interactive fiction (called "nanos"), Tolkien-themed interactive fiction... From 1999 to 2002 eight of these competitions have taken place, raising the year production to almost 50 games. From 2001 there's also an Anual Competition, the Premios Hispanos (Hispanic Prizes).

Links

• Wikipedia - Spanish IF Community history and works. Note: Page is in Spanish
• CAAD - Club de Aventuras AD: spanish IF Community webpage.
• SPAC - Sociedad para la Preservación de las Aventuras Conversacionales. SPAC is similar to, and inspired by SPAG.
• InformATE - InformATE is a spanish Inform Library, to create and code Inform games in spanish.