PAW
The Professional Adventure Writer, and a 97% for a utility
Gilsoft's 1987 successor to The Quill added a real parser — adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns and multiple objects per command — plus 128K support and object weights. CRASH scored it 97% and said it would matter more than everything else in adventures put together.
PAW — the Professional Adventure Writer — is Gilsoft’s successor to The Quill, and the tool that most British adventures of the late 1980s were built with.
CRASH’s adventure column introduced it in May 1987 with an unusually direct claim: that it would have a bigger impact on the adventure scene than everything else the column had covered put together. The magazine then scored it 97%.
Fast facts
- Producer: Gilsoft.
- Price: £22.95 — roughly twice the price of a full-price game.
- Authors: Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle, Phil Wade, Alex Williams, Kevin Maddocks and Dicon Peeke.
- Spectrum versions: 48K, Plus, 128 and Plus 2.
- Ports: CRASH listed Commodore 64 and Amstrad as “coming soon” at review time.
How it was received
| Magazine | Score | Date |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | 97% | May 1987 |
| Sinclair User | 5/5 | May 1987 |
A utility scoring 97% is worth pausing on. CRASH was not rating a game; it was rating what the tool made possible for its readers, which is the same judgement the magazine had made about The Quill four years earlier at a lower ceiling.
What it added over The Quill
The Quill’s parser was verb-noun. PAW’s was a parser in the fuller sense, and CRASH’s review works through the specifics:
- Adjectives — a GREEN jumper, a LIT or UNLIT torch.
- Adverbs — HAPPILY married.
- Prepositions — talk TO him.
- Pronouns — the vocabulary carries numeric values so that the program knows SWORD is the object referred to by IT.
- Multiple objects — including GET ALL and DROP ALL.
- Synonyms, so that varied input still receives a reply.
The vocabulary values do real work: nouns below 50 and above 49 separate categories, and values under 20 are “conversion nouns” that the program treats as verbs — which is how NORTH functions as a command rather than a thing.
Beyond the parser:
- The full 128K of the newer Spectrums, rather than 48K.
- Object weight, so carrying capacity becomes a designed constraint.
- Worn, removable and container objects — CRASH’s example is trousers with pockets.
- Independent characters who interact rather than sit still.
- 256 flags, with diagnostic display during testing.
- Graphics, which CRASH described as “quick, easily-drawn”, with rubber-band drawing.
Why it mattered
The Quill let people who could not program ship an adventure. PAW let them ship one that did not feel like a Quill game — which was the ceiling the earlier tool had imposed on its own users. The parser limitations of Quilled adventures were a standing complaint in the adventure columns, and PAW answered them directly.
Its descendant DAAD, written by Tim Gilberts for the Spanish studio Aventuras AD, carried the same design onto eight machines from one source file and became the foundation of a Spanish-language adventure community that outlived the British one by decades. DAAD was later released into the public domain and repackaged for modern use, which is why PAW’s design is still in service.