PAW, the Professional Adventure Writer, was Gilsoft’s answer to its own success. The Quill had let people who could not program write text adventures since 1983, but its games understood two words at a time and its graphics, split screens and text compression came as separate add-ons. PAW put all of that into one program and added a parser that could follow a sentence such as GET THE SWORD AND KILL THE ORC WITH IT THEN DROP IT. CRASH’s adventure column announced it in May 1987 as the one release that month that would “have a bigger impact on the adventure scene than all of the rest put together”, and gave it 97%.
Fast facts
- Publisher: Gilsoft, 2 Park Crescent, Barry.
- Authors: Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle, Phil Wade, Alex Williams, Kevin Maddocks and Dicon Peeke, as CRASH credited them.
- Released: spring 1987, for the Spectrum 48K, Plus, 128 and +2 on one cassette, at £22.95.
- Disc versions: £27.95 by mail order, for the Opus Discovery, DISCiPLE and Beta disc interfaces.
- Other machines: a CP/M version for the Amstrad PCW (£27.95) and CPC, from early 1988.
- Games written with it: 510 Spectrum titles in the ZX-Database, as counted in October 2022.
Why Gilsoft built it
Gilsoft had been in no hurry to give The Quill a clever parser. In 1985 Tim Gilberts told Sinclair User that elaborate parsers could “actually limit communication”, and that he preferred verb-noun input. Meanwhile Incentive’s Graphic Adventure Creator, which reached the Spectrum in 1986, offered a sentence parser, a picture editor and text compression in a single package. Looking back in 2005, Gilberts was blunt about the connection: GAC was “competent but not my cup of tea. We produced PAW to combat it.”
By then he also remembered the parser argument the other way round. “I wanted the PAW parser to be intelligent, so people could type in English what they wanted to do and the code would do the rest,” he told Retro Gamer, adding that Yeandle had wanted commands kept simple: “Graeme and I always disagreed about extending the parser.”
Howard Gilberts showed PAW at a show in late 1986, where Sinclair User found that it drew the biggest crowds. It was advertised from April 1987.
What it could do
PAW kept The Quill’s menu-driven editor, so an author still worked through single-letter options: V for vocabulary, L for locations, C for connections, O for objects and so on. The difference was in what the finished game could understand and do.
A real parser. Your Sinclair’s Mike Gerrard counted what a single sentence could hold: one verb, two nouns, an adjective for each, an adverb, a preposition, and speech to another character in quotation marks. Input could run to 125 characters, strung together with AND, THEN or punctuation, so a player could type GO NORTH, GET THE BUN AND FEED IT TO THE ELEPHANT in one go. GET ALL and DROP ALL worked, and so did GET ALL EXCEPT THE FROG. Words were matched on their first five letters instead of The Quill’s four, which, Gerrard noted, meant a game could at last hold both a mouse and a moustache.
Pronouns by number. Every word in the vocabulary had a number, and the numbers carried meaning. Nouns numbered 49 or below were treated as proper names, and the parser skipped them when working out what IT referred to. Your Sinclair’s example was GET THE BUN AND FEED THE ELEPHANT WITH IT: give the elephant a low number and the parser knows IT is the bun, not the elephant. Nouns numbered below 20 were “conversion nouns” that could stand in for a verb, which is how a player could type just NORTH.
Objects with properties. Objects could have a weight, so an author set how much a player could carry, not just how many things. They could also be worn and removed, or act as containers. CRASH’s example was a pair of trousers with pockets.
Characters and process tables. A game’s logic lived in tables of “condacts”, conditions and actions, and the tables could call each other like subroutines. A whole table could be given over to one character’s behaviour, and characters could move around independently and take instructions through SAY TO.
Flags you could change while playing. PAW had 256 flags, more than 200 of them free for the author. During testing, the author could display a flag and change its value without going back to the editor, which Your Sinclair thought would be “a real boon”.
Presentation. Pictures, drawn with a built-in editor that had rubber-band lines and fast shading, could fill the screen, share it with scrolling text or sit in a fixed window, and the layout could change during a game. Up to five extra character sets could be held in memory at once, chosen from 22 supplied fonts or designed in the program’s own editor. On the 128K machines nearly all the program’s overlays loaded in one go, and the game itself could use the full 128K.
The package came with a 66-page introductory manual, a 72-page technical guide and a sample adventure called Tewk. Derek Brewster, reviewing it for CRASH, credited the manuals’ readability to “Tim Gilberts’ obvious love of adventuring” and his willingness to lighten a heavy passage with a joke.
How it was received
| Magazine | Verdict | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | 97% | issue 40, May 1987 |
| Sinclair User | Classic | issue 62, May 1987 |
| Your Sinclair | reviewed by Mike Gerrard | issue 18, June 1987 |
Brewster had never liked GAC, and he used the review to say so: he had “remained sceptical as all around praised a utility which I thought lost an opportunity to see adventuring through the late eighties”. PAW was different. “I found the program exciting,” he wrote, and in the same issue’s letters page he called it “a work of genius”. His one caution was the price: “At first sight, £22.95 may seem a lot to ask for any Spectrum software.”
Sinclair User was just as sure. “There’s no Noun/Verb nonsense with PAW,” its reviewer wrote, and ventured that there were “no straight graphic/text adventures that I’ve seen on the Spectrum” that could not have been designed with it. Your Sinclair’s Gerrard expected “a whole flood of PAWd adventures very soon”.
The games
The flood came, more slowly than Gerrard expected. In January 1988 Computer and Video Games described CRL’s Jack the Ripper, written by the St Brides team, as the first commercially available adventure written with PAW, and compared it with Melbourne House’s Sherlock: “Sherlock without bugs”. Much of PAW’s output, like The Quill’s, came from small labels and individual authors selling by mail order. By October 2022 the ZX-Database listed 510 Spectrum games made with PAW, against 531 made with The Quill.
Other machines
Gilsoft’s first advertisements promised Commodore 64 and Amstrad versions “coming soon”. The Amstrad version that arrived was a CP/M program. 8000 Plus reviewed it for the Amstrad PCW in February 1988 at £27.95, and Amstrad Action reported in April 1988 that it would run on any CPC with CP/M, the 464 and 664 included. In February 1990 Howard Gilberts told ST Format that an Atari ST version would follow once he could get Tim back from Spain, where he was helping to produce a Spanish version of PAW. There Tim Gilberts went on to write DAAD for the Spanish publisher Aventuras AD, a successor that produced games for eight machines from one database; the entry on Tim Gilberts follows that story.
Still in use
In 2005 Gilberts said he was “happy for my portions of code to be distributed as is”, and noted that PC remakes of The Quill and PAW had appeared. One of them, InPAWS, is an unofficial version for Windows. The ZX Spectrum Next comes with a full copy of PAW for the Spectrum +3, and since December 2024 Gilberts has used his “Adventure Trail” column in Next Magazine to teach readers how to write their own games with it.
Sources
- Richard Price, “Fantastic landscapes”, Sinclair User issue 37, April 1985, pp. 68–69: Tim Gilberts on parsers and verb-noun input.
- Sinclair User issue 57, December 1986: Howard Gilberts demonstrating PAW at a show, where it “drew the biggest crowds”.
- Sinclair User issue 61, April 1987: Gilsoft advertisement (Spectrum 48K, Plus, 128 and Plus 2; Commodore 64 and Amstrad “coming soon”; £22.95).
- CRASH issue 40, May 1987: Derek Brewster’s Adventure Trail introduction, p. 50 (“a bigger impact on the adventure scene than all of the rest put together”); Gilsoft advertisement, p. 53; review of The Professional Adventure Writer, pp. 54–55 (price, authors, parser, pronoun numbering, conversion nouns, object weights and containers, process tables, flags, display modes, machines and disc versions, Overall 97%); letters page, “a work of genius”.
- Sinclair User issue 62, May 1987: review of PAW in the Toolkit section (Classic; “no Noun/Verb nonsense”; 128K overlays; comparison with GAC).
- Mike Gerrard, review of PAW, Your Sinclair issue 18, June 1987, pp. 30–31: manuals and Tewk, five-letter words, flags and diagnostics, proper nouns and IT, sentence structure, 125-character input, character sets, £22.95 cassette and £27.95 microdrive.
- Computer and Video Games issue 75, January 1988: review of Jack the Ripper, “the first commercially available adventure written using Gilsoft’s Professional Adventure Writer”.
- 8000 Plus issue 17, February 1988: review of The Professional Adventure Writer for the Amstrad PCW (£27.95).
- Amstrad Action issue 31, April 1988: PAW for Amstrad CP/M machines, including the CPC 464 and 664.
- ST Format issue 7, February 1990: Howard Gilberts on an ST version and Tim Gilberts in Spain.
- Chris Wild, “Gilsoft: The Welsh Wizards”, Retro Gamer issue 16, 2005, pp. 54–57: Gilberts on GAC (“We produced PAW to combat it”), the parser disagreement with Yeandle, and distribution of his code.
- Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia, volume 1 (English edition), pp. 242–243: ZX-Database counts of games made with The Quill and PAW as of October 2022; InPAWS.
- Tim Gilberts, “Adventure Trail”, Next Magazine issue 5, December 2024, and issue 7, March 2025: the column and PAW on the Next.