IF Contest Page

The 4th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition's Website

It's become a grand tradition since starting in 1995. The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. If you thrilled to your Commodore 64 or Apple II disk drive whirring after you typed

   > KILL TROLL WITH SWORD

or the less violent

   > TAKE NO TEA

then you'll love the Interactive Fiction Competition. Traditionally an all text contest, this year promises a graphic flavour also with the Hugo and HTML-TADS game engines. Anyone can enter the IF Competition, and anyone else can download the games and be a judge. So join in the fun!

The Competition is Over

Final Placings

The votes are in, the counting is done, and the final placings are:

FIRST PLACE: Photopia by Adam Cadre
SECOND PLACE: Muse: An autumn romance by Christopher Huang
THIRD PLACE: The Plant by Mike Roberts
4: Arrival by Stephen Granade
5: Enlightenment by Taro Ogawa
6: Mother Loose by Irene Callaci
7: Little Blue Men by Michael Gentry
8: Trapped in a One-Room Dilly by Laura Knauth
9: Persistence of Memory by Jason Dyer
10: Downtown Tokyo. Present Day. by John Kean
11: Informatory by Bill Shlaer
12: The Ritual of Purification by Jarek Sobolewski
13: The City by Sam Barlow
14: Where Evil Dwells by Steve Owens and Paul Johnson
15: Purple by Stefan Blixt
16: Four in One by J Robinson Wheeler
17: Research Dig by Chris Armitage
18: CC by Mikko Vuorinen
19: Spacestation by David Ledgard
20: Cattus Atrox by David Cornelson
21: In the Spotlight by John Byrd
22: Lightania by Gustav Bodell
23: Acid Whiplash by Cody Sandifer and Rybread Celsius
24: I Didn't Know You Could Yodel by Andrew Indovina and Michael Eisenman
25: Fifteen by Ricardo Dague
26: The Commute by Kevin Copeland
27: Human Resources Stories by Harry Hardjono

Miss Congeniality

The authors' votes have been tallied, and our Miss Congeniality winners are:

FIRST PLACE: Photopia
SECOND PLACE: Little Blue Men
THIRD PLACE: Muse

Congratulations to all the authors! Many thanks to our vote counters, Colin Turnbull and Dylan O'Donnell. Also, Lucian Smith, Liza Daly and everyone else who has worked so hard to make the 1998 IF Competition what it was.

Play the Games

Of course, the wonderful games everyone submitted are still available. Go to the 1998 Competition directory at the IF Archive and grab the file comp98.zip. Make sure to unzip comp98.zip using directory names! Some Mac users have had trouble with this file, so our thanks go to Andrew Plotkin for uploading a Mac binary archive, Comp98.sit.bin, which can be found in the same directory. Alternatively, grab comp98.z5, let it choose games for you, and download them one at a time from within that area.

Game Updates: There are sound files available for Arrival, if you can handle a 2.1MB download. Also, a walkthrough for Cattus Atrox is now available if you're stuck in that game.

Bug Reports: Please look in the Arrival directory and Photopia directory for important bug reports which will save you having to restart your game.

See you next year.

So, what do you need to know?

Entrants will need to read:

Judges should read:

Not sure what all this is about? Take a look at:

Then take a look for some games here:

Mail the organiser to enter or ask for any information.

1998 IF Competition organised by David Dyte. Thanks to Jason Melancon for maintaining the web pages until now, and of course to G. Kevin Wilson for organising the first three competitions.

The official rock band of the 1998 IF Competition is Sadie Hawkins.

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