Tim Gilberts
Ran Gilsoft at twenty, and is still at it
Founded Gilsoft as a pocket-money venture at seventeen, published The Quill and PAW, then wrote DAAD for a Spanish studio — the tool that kept Spanish adventure writing alive for decades. Still active, and involved with the ZX Spectrum Next.
Tim Gilberts owned and ran Gilsoft, the South Wales company behind The Quill and PAW — between them the tools that most British text adventures of the 1980s were built with.
Sinclair User profiled him in April 1985 and described “a soft spoken twenty-year old Welshman”, a product of the whizz-kid era who had left school early to get into computing.
In his own words, 1985
Gilsoft started mainly as a pocket money venture. I bought myself a Spectrum when it came on the market and pretty soon had a full-scale business on my hands.
He added that he could have gone to university and ended up working for a large company, and had no regrets about not doing so.
What he made
- Games first. CRASH reviewed a short line of 16K Spectrum games at £5.95 credited to T Gilberts through 1984, including Styx.
- The Quill (1983), written by Graeme Yeandle and published by Gilsoft, with conversions to the Commodore 64 and Amstrad.
- PAW (1987). CRASH credits the Professional Adventure Writer to Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle, Phil Wade, Alex Williams, Kevin Maddocks and Dicon Peeke, and elsewhere in the same issue refers to what “Tim Gilberts’ team acquired”. It scored 97%.
- S.W.A.N. — Sinclair User reported in August 1988 on a further adventure writing system, the System Without A Name, developed by Gilberts and Yeandle among others.
Howard Gilberts also appears in the press for Gilsoft, demonstrating PAW for Sinclair User in December 1986.
The parser argument he lost to himself
The 1985 profile records Gilberts as unenthusiastic about elaborate parsers. He thought complex interpreters could “actually limit communication”, because the player ends up working out which phrase the author implemented before a character will respond at all.
Two years later his own team shipped PAW, whose headline features are adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and pronoun resolution. The objection was never that parsers were bad; it was that a half-built parser is worse than an honest verb-noun one. PAW is what agreeing with both halves of that looks like.
DAAD, and the Spain he was afraid to post to
The 1985 profile has Gilberts worrying about piracy and saying he was “scared even to send samples to places like Spain or Portugal”. What happened next is better than the worry.
In the late 1980s he developed DAAD — the Diseñador de Aventuras AD — for the Spanish studio Aventuras AD. It was the Gilsoft line taken to its conclusion: one source file compiling to the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, PCW, MSX, Atari ST, Amiga and PC. The country he had been afraid to send samples to became the one that sustained the technology.
Spanish adventure writing outlived the British scene by decades on the back of it, and DAAD is still the tool that community uses.
Still going
Aventuras AD’s Andrés Samudio released DAAD into the public domain, and Gilberts is credited with the work of getting it there and with packaging and documenting the system for modern use. That effort became DAAD Ready, which bundles the interpreters, the DRC compiler, the Maluva plugins and build scripts for every target — and an official DAAD repository is maintained publicly.
The ZX Spectrum Next is part of that, and it is reported in a magazine rather than only online. ZX Spectrum Gamer — a modern Spectrum title held in this library — notes that “Tim Gilberts (of Gilsoft fame) has shown interest in bringing the Professional Adventure Writing System (PAW) to the platform”, and sets it beside Arcade Game Designer as the two tools its writer thinks could keep the Next alive:
I believe that both these pieces of software could be crucial in the long term, allowing average Joes like you and me to create essential content that will keep the machine and its community alive.
The 2020 Next Adventure Jam let entrants target the machine through this lineage, and the Next’s SD storage removes the constraints the tape-era versions were built around.
Four decades after the pocket-money venture, the same person is still shipping the same idea.
⚠ This section is drawn from present-day web sources rather than the period magazine archive this library holds, which stops in the mid-2000s. Current activity is the kind of claim that decays; check before relying on it.