Interactive fiction is thirty years old. Though there were precursors, it really began with the original adventure game of Crowther and Woods, a simulated exploration of a network of caves, stocked with treasures and hazards both realistic (expiring lamp batteries) and fantastical (a dragon perched on a carpet). With no graphics of any kind, the game described the situation in which "you" find yourself, and then asked what you wanted to do: and so the story elaborated in a long dialogue.

Such textual explorations created a popular and highly commercial genre of computer game in the 1980s, and while much of the market consisted of derivative works now forgotten, a number of design houses pushed the format into a cultish new art-form: Melbourne House, Level 9, and above all Infocom, Inc., whose three dozen works were as influential to IF as the classic Tintin albums were in shaping the graphic novel of today.

Strictly textual IF disappeared from the commercial marketplace around 1990. Today's games console franchises, like Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider, may be deeply rooted in 1970s adventures, but they could not really be called dialogues. Yet that apparent abandonment turned out to be a beginning, not an end. Around 1992, the growing Internet allowed IF enthusiasts to come together, and to develop tools to create their own works - something which contemporary home computers were only just powerful enough to do. Among these tools was Inform, which in its successive versions has been used continuously since 1993.