A Fable

Parody:

In the late '90s some wags around the RAIF UseNet newsgroup, specifically Graeme Cree in 1996 in this case, thought that it would be funny to give the "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" treatment to what they considered to be sub-par games.

Fan ports:

As the "MiSTed" version of the game was written in Inform, a pure port was also achieved by Stuart Moore by stripping the game of its parodic elements. Additionally, some time prior in 1989, elite Atari ST hackers celebrated the new availability of an AGT interpreter for their platform by source-porting several AGT games, including this one, to be playable on that machine -- as bundled first in Serenade's PD Disk 46 and later (1993) in Mug UK's Game Pack 16 in 1993.

Author's note:

``` From: [email protected] (Stan Heller) Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction Subject: FABLE:Electronic Note in a Bottle Date: 4 Sep 1995 16:09:07 GMT

I was quite surprised yesterday to see that one of the recent offerings in the Interactive Fiction Archive was written by me and dated 1985. The piece was called "Fable" and after an inquiry to Volker Blasius I discovered that not only has this been bouncing around the Net for years, it was even panned in a review.

Just for the record, "Fable" was a sketch and never intended for full public release. I was helping Mark Welch beta test an adventure game authoring system. I guess he needed a few concrete examples to demo and he used my stuff. It was not a complete game, never intended to be and I am a bit embarrassed to discover it on the NET in this form.

To give you all the proper historical context, that sketch was written on an IBM PCjr (!!!)

Now that I know it is out there, I suspect I will have to dust off the old files and actually write the full game. I think I will use a different game authoring system, however.

As I told Volker, I'm not angry about this- just surprised and a bit amused. To anyone who took "Fable" as a finished work ( or even cared) this is a disclaimer. I did not think the work was finished and I never would have published it ot[sic] the Net in its present form.

                                    =stan

```