Blast From The Past: Interactive Fiction Games Come To Kindle

The year is 1603, and you are in Elizabethan London. When you receive an invitation from an old acquaintance, you expect nothing but an entertaining evening with good food and drink. Instead, you find yourself plunged into a conspiracy of black magic involving some of the most powerful and important men in London. Will you thwart this conspiracy before it brings down the entire city? That’s up to you in “The King of Shreds and Patches,” a new interactive fiction game for Kindle. Rather, the game is new for Kindle but its concept dates back to the 1980s. “The King of Shreds and Patches” was originally available as a desktop PC game, the creation of Jimmy Maher, an expert in interactive fiction. He defines the concept of interactive fiction in more detail here, but here’s the basic definition: [Interactive fiction is] a unique form of computer-based storytelling which places the player in the role of a character in a simulated world, and which is characterized by its reliance upon text as its primary means of output and by its use of a flexible natural-language parser for input. The term originated, many years after the birth of the genre it describes, in the early 1980s with a company called Infocom. At that time, games of this sort were commonly known as “adventure games” or “text adventures,” the latter to distinguish them from the graphical brand of story-based games which were just beginning to compete with text-based titles in the marketplac