Before The Quill, as Sinclair User put it, only people with “extensive programming experience and knowledge of machine code could hope to produce large, fast and responsive home-made adventures”. Gilsoft’s adventure writing system, published for the 48K ZX Spectrum in late 1983 at £14.95, took that requirement away. You typed in your rooms, objects, words and rules; The Quill turned them into a machine-code game that loaded and ran on its own, and Gilsoft asked for nothing in return but a credit. Within eighteen months Sinclair User reported that “amateurs and small one-horse companies now churn out truckloads of games written with its aid”, and that big publishers were selling them too.
Fast facts
- Author: Graeme Yeandle, with Tim Gilberts.
- Publisher: Gilsoft, 30 Hawthorn Road, Barry, South Glamorgan, who advertised themselves as “The Welsh Wizards of Adventure”.
- Released: late 1983, for the 48K Spectrum, at £14.95.
- Conversions: Commodore 64 (1984), Amstrad CPC (by 1985), Oric-1 and Atmos (by 1986), and BBC Micro and Electron (1986).
- Add-ons: The Illustrator (1985, location pictures), The Patch (1985, split screens and sound) and The Press (1986, text compression).
- Successor: the Professional Adventure Writer (PAW), reviewed in 1987.
How it came about
The Quill grew out of a game-writing hobby. Tim Gilberts, who owned and ran Gilsoft, told Sinclair User in 1985 that Yeandle, a friend and a systems analyst, had been swapping adventures he had written in machine code, among them Magic Castle. Gilberts borrowed the program, looked it over and debugged it. “After that, Graham and I talked it over and decided it was worth trying to develop an adventure writing program based on it.” Yeandle went away for a few months and came back with what Gilberts called “a pre-production copy”. The two spent nearly a year developing it, mostly by telephone, because Yeandle worked freelance and lived some way away.
They built it for beginners on purpose. “We wanted to encourage non-programmers to write their own games and it was specifically intended for the amateur or semi-professional,” Gilberts said. A cleverer parser would have cost memory that the games needed, and he preferred verb-noun input anyway: elaborate parsers could “actually limit communication”, leaving the player hunting for the one phrase the author had thought of.
How it worked
The Quill ran as a menu of editors, each looking after one part of the game’s data. CRASH‘s review in May 1984 listed the main ones: vocabulary, message text, location text, the movement table, the object table and the objects’ starting locations, the event table and the status table, with options to test the adventure, count the bytes spare and set the colours.
Everything was numbered. Each word in the vocabulary had a number, and words with the same number were synonyms. Location 0 came already written; you amended it and inserted the rest. Movement was entered as a line of connections, so “1 N 2 W 6” meant that from location 1 you could go north to location 2 or west to location 6. Objects were placed by number, as in “3 4” for object 3 starting in location 4.
The logic lived in the event and status tables. Each entry matched a verb and noun the player typed, then tested conditions and carried out actions: letting an object be picked up or opened, printing a message, moving the player. Flags recorded what had happened, and authors used them for scores, for rooms that were dark until a lamp was lit, and for the countdowns that Sinclair User noticed in “game after game” to warn you that you were getting hungry, weak or thirsty. CRASH called the event table “the heart of the editor”, and warned that the order of its entries mattered.
The result was a machine-code database and a small interpreter. The interpreter read verb-noun commands, recognised only the first four letters of each word, and answered instantly. According to Sinclair User, it took only about 7K of memory, leaving room for about 30K of game data and up to 200 locations. Players learned to spot a Quilled game by its manners as well as its credit: the whole screen scrolling up as you typed, and a Quit routine that asked whether you really wanted to end it all.
What reviewers said
Sinclair User’s first review, in December 1983, said that writing an adventure had “proved almost impossible for a user who knows little about computer programming” until The Quill, and that now “all you have to do is provide the story lines”. In May 1984 CRASH gave the program a feature, “The Quill Drips Gold”, and argued that “at £14.95 it is almost ludicrously underpriced for what it does and, more importantly, what it allows others to do”. Its reviewer doubted it would ruin the market for commercial adventures: “thousands, millions, of people own typewriters, but how many of them write novels?”
It sold like a game as well. The Quill sat in the CRASH readers’ chart through 1984, at number 31 in June and number 34 in December, just above Ant Attack and Jetpac. In April 1985 Amstrad Computer User reported that it had won an award as utility of the year, and summed up what it offered: “All you need is a good plot and twenty minutes with the instruction book.”
Its reach also drew complaints. When Melbourne House, the publisher of The Hobbit, released Hampstead in 1984, Sinclair User’s reviewer noted that it was “written on the Quill” and thought that “using an all-purpose program limits the scope of the game”. Gilberts saw it the other way: “It shows that The Quill can produce top-quality adventures and isn’t just some kind of toy.”
Games written with The Quill
Gilsoft sold some itself, as the £5.95 Gold Collection. CRASH reviewed four in May 1984: Yeandle’s own Magic Castle, which it called “one of the earliest adventures written with The Quill”, Tom Davies’s Africa Gardens, Barsak the Dwarf by P. and V. Napolitano, and David Brammer’s Spyplane. Others that period reviews name as written with it include:
| Game | Publisher | Reviewed |
|---|---|---|
| Denis Through the Drinking Glass | Applications | CRASH, May 1984 |
| Hampstead | Melbourne House | Sinclair User, December 1984 |
| Project X – The Microman | Compass | Sinclair User, April 1985; CRASH, September 1985 |
| Bored of the Rings | Delta 4 | CRASH, July 1985 (Quill and Illustrator) |
| Subsunk | Firebird | Sinclair User, August 1985 |
| Robin of Sherlock | Silversoft | CRASH, February 1986 (Quill, Illustrator and Patch) |
Bored of the Rings and Robin of Sherlock are by Fergus McNeill of Delta 4, whose adventure parodies grew out of the tool. ACE wrote in 1988 that, “seizing on The Quill at the very start”, he had produced “one or two so-so games” before finding his forte in parody.
The Illustrator, The Patch and The Press
Gilsoft kept extending the system rather than replacing it. The Illustrator, advertised as available in January 1985 at £14.95, added pictures. Each location’s picture was stored as a string of drawing commands, such as plot, line, fill and shade, which the program replayed when the player arrived. CRASH’s reviewer missed a circle command but called it “a very easy means of creating graphics”.
The Patch (£5.99, 1985) changed the database and graphics programs so that a picture could sit above scrolling text, and added sound effects and alternative typefaces, all switched on through flags. Sinclair User gave it five stars. The Press (£6.95, 1986), written by Phil Wade, compressed a finished game’s text and code to make room for up to 11K more, and added a RAM disc and switchable character sets. Sinclair User called it “another example of Gilsoft genius”.
By May 1987 CRASH’s adventure editor, Derek Brewster, thought The Quill had “begun to fall behind despite additions such as The Illustrator, The Patch, and The Press”. The same review gave Gilsoft’s new Professional Adventure Writer, with a full sentence parser, 97%.
Sources
- Gilsoft advertisements: Your Computer, October 1983, p. 111; Micro Adventurer, November 1983, p. 46 (£14.95, 30 Hawthorn Road, Barry); Commodore Horizons, August 1984, p. 48 (Commodore 64 version, £14.95 cassette, £19.95 disc); CRASH issue 8, September 1984, p. 70 (“The Welsh Wizards of Adventure”); Sinclair User issue 39, June 1985, p. 120 (Spectrum and Commodore 64 £14.95, Amstrad £16.95, Oric coming soon); Your Sinclair issue 4, April 1986, p. 76 (Oric-1 and Atmos); Acorn User issue 48, July 1986, p. 29 (BBC Micro and Electron).
- Sinclair User issue 21, December 1983, p. 48: “Handy quill opens-up adventure games”.
- CRASH issue 4, May 1984, pp. 3, 49–52: “The Quill Drips Gold”; the review of The Quill, its menu and tables, and the Gold Collection reviews.
- CRASH issue 5, June 1984, p. 72, and issue 11, December 1984, p. 129: the readers’ chart.
- Sinclair User issue 33, December 1984, p. 44 (review of Hampstead) and p. 164 (room for about 30K of data).
- Richard Price, “Fantastic landscapes”, Sinclair User issue 37, April 1985, pp. 68–69: the interpreter, 7K and 200 locations, the Quilled style, Gilsoft’s no-royalty policy and Tim Gilberts on the origin of The Quill.
- Amstrad Computer User issue 5, April 1985, p. 6: the utility of the year award and “twenty minutes with the instruction book”.
- Micro Adventurer, January 1985, p. 23: The Illustrator available at £14.95.
- CRASH issue 14, March 1985, p. 109: review of The Illustrator.
- Sinclair User issue 41, August 1985, p. 93: Subsunk.
- CRASH issue 18, July 1985, p. 102: Bored of the Rings.
- CRASH issue 20, September 1985, p. 95: Project X – The Microman.
- CRASH issue 25, February 1986, p. 84: Robin of Sherlock.
- Sinclair User issue 44, November 1985, p. 102: review of The Patch.
- Sinclair User issue 57, December 1986, p. 128: review of The Press.
- Derek Brewster, review of the Professional Adventure Writer, CRASH issue 40, May 1987, p. 55.
- ACE issue 9, June 1988: Fergus McNeill and Delta 4.