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How it all started with real-life ARPAnet developer and cave-explorer, William Crowther, who decided to make
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a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.
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Thus "Adventure" was born. The great-grand-daddy of them all!
King's Quest coverage. The original was fully and faithfully redone with enhanced graphics and sound by an amateur game designer. Something about her story would be interesting too as she went on to found her own inde game co after the huge success of her fan-made ramake.
I'd also like to see a section dedicated to those of us who have always fantasized about making something similar to our favorite classic game but thought it impossible [and it nearly was back then!]. Now there are an endless variety of ways we can do it for free and with very little effort. I recommend starting the section off with a nice little history of game-makers starting with the revolutionary Adventure Construction Set by Stuart Smith. I've found much better since then but nothing to match the feeling it gave me back then of being able to actually create my first game and really feel that I was only limited by my imagination!
Oh btw: There is an excellent remake of ACS called Adventure Creation Kit by Chris Hopkins. He created it in the 1990's but went back to it in recent years to provide some bug fixes and updates based on feedback when he realized there was still a few people interested in it. You can find those people in their own sub-forum at joltcountry bbs er... forums.
Although ACS was the first graphical game maker there were actually already text-adventure game design kits or languages before that. Now called Interactive Fiction or IF for short there is a fair-sized very active community of players/authors built up around the genre today and the IF development software has really become quite sophisticated as well far more user friendly. I would definitely include TADS3 and Inform 7 as the latest and greatest to evolve from that scene.
Then theres all the many modern RPG game makers that evolved from the graphical game maker represented by ACS. There were the Klick team game makers which are now very out of date but still could be fun for beginners or kids. The RPG Maker series by Enterbrain (not free), and many clones of it came out later that are open source.
There are really powerful but easy to use game authoring softwares that can not only make RPGs but can make pretty much any kind of game you want.
Game Maker by YoYo Games is probably the most popular and well known.
Express Game Maker is another popular one.
Construct may be counted along with those last two as one of the big three of todays virtually unlimited game making software with fully developed user friendly front end making programming optional.
The Game Creators dot com develops several different types of game making software including Dark Basic and FPS Creator.
For those seeking to use or learn programming to make games there are also great tools for getting started with that. Such as Flashpunk for programming flash based games. And XNA for programming games in C#. Pygames helps you get started programming games in Python. And there are tons of tutorials on creating games with Java using the friendly Eclipse IDE. I left out many many other options for the sake of space but those were the ones that really stand out.