Tim Gilberts was seventeen when he started Gilsoft in Barry, South Wales, and twenty when Sinclair User came to see how “a pocket money venture” had become the company behind The Quill. He did not write The Quill; his friend Graeme Yeandle did. Gilberts debugged it, published it, and made the decision that shaped what happened next: anyone could sell the games they wrote with it, and Gilsoft would take nothing. He then spent the rest of the decade building bigger adventure systems, one of which is still used for Spanish adventures today.
Fast facts
- Company: Gilsoft, founded 1982, where he was technical director.
- Published: The Quill (1983) and its add-ons.
- Led: the Professional Adventure Writer (1987).
- Wrote: S.W.A.N. (1988, with others) and DAAD (late 1980s) for Aventuras AD.
- Now: writes the “Adventure Trail” column in Next Magazine.
Gilsoft
Gilberts had been writing programs for the ZX81, and when the Spectrum came out he expected a rush of demand for games. His father put up the money, and Gilsoft became a family firm: Tim as technical director, his father Howard as managing director, his mother as company secretary. Gilsoft was advertising a Spectrum game, 3D Maze of Gold, by December 1982, and CRASH reviewed it under his name in its first issue in 1984.
Sinclair User’s profile in April 1985 described “a soft spoken twenty-year old Welshman”, a product of the “whizz-kid era” who had left school early to get into computing. “Gilsoft started mainly as a pocket money venture,” he said. “I bought myself a Spectrum when it came on the market and pretty soon had a full-scale business on my hands.” He could have gone to university and ended up at “some big company”, he said, but had no regrets.
The Quill and the parser
When Yeandle mentioned the adventures he had been writing in machine code, Gilberts borrowed the program, looked it over and debugged it. The two then spent nearly a year turning it into The Quill, mostly by telephone. In 1985 Gilberts was firm that it was meant for beginners. “We wanted to encourage non-programmers to write their own games and it was specifically intended for the amateur or semi-professional,” he said.
He was also wary of clever parsers. “In some ways that kind of thing can actually limit communication,” he told Sinclair User: players spent their time hunting for the one phrase a character would respond to, and the “Inglish” of The Hobbit could be “quite quixotic and difficult to fathom”. He preferred “the usual verb/noun entry”.
Two years later his team’s Professional Adventure Writer had a full sentence parser, and CRASH gave it 97% in May 1987. By 2005 Gilberts remembered the argument the other way round. “I wanted the PAW parser to be intelligent, so people could type in English what they wanted to do,” he told Retro Gamer, and it was Yeandle who thought commands should stay simple: “Graeme and I always disagreed about extending the parser.”
S.W.A.N. and DAAD
In 1988 Gilberts built a new system for two small adventure houses, Fergus McNeill’s Delta 4 and Anna Popkess’s Abstract Concepts. Sinclair User called it S.W.A.N., the System Without A Name, developed by Gilberts, Yeandle and Hugh Hamer-Powell, and reported that Mindfighter had been written with it. Its point, Gilberts said later, was that a game could be written on one machine and the same data used on all the others.
In 1985 he had told Sinclair User that piracy was worst abroad: “I’m scared even to send samples to places like Spain or Portugal.” Five years later he was working there. In February 1990 ST Format reported that Howard Gilberts hoped to “drag programmer Tim Gilberts back from Spain”, where he was helping with a Spanish version of PAW. For the Spanish publisher Aventuras AD he wrote DAAD, an adventure system that produced games for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Amstrad PCW, Atari ST, Amiga and PC from one database. Aventuras AD’s founder, Andrés Samudio, later released DAAD into the public domain.
Still going
In 2005 Gilberts told Retro Gamer that he was working for the fire service. He has since gone back to adventures. The ZX Spectrum Next comes with a full copy of PAW for the Spectrum +3, and since December 2024 Gilberts has written Next Magazine’s “Adventure Trail”, named after Derek Brewster’s column in CRASH, under the byline “Gilberts The Grey”. He came to it by staffing the adventure stand at CRASH Live in 2024, and he uses the column to teach readers how to write their own games with PAW. He has reported that DAAD, “which I produced for Aventuras AD in the late 80s”, is now maintained and extended for modern machines by a developer known online as Uto (@uto_dev), whose Maluva extension adds Next graphics.
In March 2025 the column carried his obituary of Graeme Yeandle, whose funeral he had attended.
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 9, December 1982, p. 81: Gilsoft advertisement for 3D Maze of Gold.
- CRASH issue 1, February 1984: review of 3D Maze of Gold, author T Gilberts.
- Richard Price, “Fantastic landscapes”, Sinclair User issue 37, April 1985, pp. 68–69: the profile of Tim Gilberts (age, the pocket-money venture, the origin of The Quill, his views on parsers and piracy).
- CRASH issue 40, May 1987, pp. 54–55: review of the Professional Adventure Writer (authors, 97%).
- Amstrad Action issue 31, April 1988: the new system Tim Gilberts developed for Delta 4 and Abstract Concepts.
- Sinclair User issue 77, August 1988: Mindfighter and S.W.A.N.
- ST Format issue 7, February 1990: Howard Gilberts on PAW for the ST and Tim Gilberts in Spain.
- Chris Wild, “Gilsoft: The Welsh Wizards”, Retro Gamer issue 16, 2005, pp. 54–57: the founding and family roles, the parser disagreement, S.W.A.N., Aventuras AD and his later work.
- Tim Gilberts, “Adventure Trail”, Next Magazine issue 5, December 2024: the first column and CRASH Live 2024.
- Tim Gilberts, “Adventure Trail”, Next Magazine issue 7, March 2025: PAW on the Next, DAAD and Maluva, and the obituary of Graeme Yeandle.
- DAAD Adventure Writer repository, GitHub (web, secondary): DAAD’s target machines and its release into the public domain by Andrés Samudio. https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/daad