Dave Bernazzani Boston, MA Member since January 22, 2014 Last visited January 31, 2016 Profile ID (TUID): htwqrjo6trami1os

ifMUD, RPG Geek Username = wavemotion

I grew up playing Scott Adams adventure games on the TI99/4a. I recall a summer where Pirate Adventure and Ghost Town were played hours and hours every day as a friend and I worked through the games. We saved and loaded so often via cassette that I can still recall the cadence of the modulation of those early games. We had no Internet to get hints - so we worked and bashed at the game until it was solved.

Later, I had the pleasure of playing Zork I on an IBM PC-Jr ... in white-on-blue color no less! We burnt in the prompt on the old CRT. Just amazing times.

In 2003 I discovered RAIF and the hobby IF Community. I got a hold of Graham Nelson's DM4 which I was blown away by (all books on learning a new programming language should be half as good!). I wrote practice games for friends and co-workers and eventually I entered the 2004 IF Comp with my game IDENTITY. It came in 15th out of 34. Not terrible, but I was disappointed given the effort involved. Later that year I developed MinForm - a stripped down version of the Inform library and developed the less-than-famous C32 Z-Machine 32K Comp (archived on the Internet Archive). The goal was to try and get back to the very basics of the medium - to constrain developers to see what they could do with very little resources. Forcing the authors to pair down their games to craft only the essentials much like the pioneers of the medium were forced to due to computer memory limitations. We had 6 entries - all of them really good, but ultimately there was not much traction for such a contest.

After a bit more than a year in the community, it became clear that my tastes as an old school Text Adventure player/author were not quite the same as the more artistic core of the IF community. I like puzzles. I like (well done) mazes. I like witty lines. I'm not interested in "playing" prose-heavy games. And so I drifted away from the IF community.

In 2010 I co-authored a game for RPG Geek/BGG as a site-wide adventure. 250 people played it. In 2012 we did a second game which drew in almost 500 players. In 2014 our third game clocked in with more than 700 players. We have hopes that in 2015 we will break the 1000 player mark.

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