About THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS a game for TAG

	It fascinates me how programmers have kept trying to come up with viable ways to write text adventures and how many obscure systems have come and gone. I'll download a game and an interpreter from the Archive just to "bag" a system I've never played with before.
	Campbell Wild's circa 1994 TAG (The Adventure Generator - as opposed to the German TAG, Text Adventure Generator) is an early protoype for his current ADRIFT system.  As Campbell explains in the Adrift 4.0 manual:

	"I found myself repeating so much code in the adventures I'd written previously that I thought I'd try my hand at writing a program to facilitate the creation of an adventure much more easily. I called this "Adventure Generator". It was a command line interface that asked a series of questions, then allowed you to play the game that it output. Although this made it quicker to create a game, it was not a very nice interface, and wasn't particularly easy. I believe I wrote this in Pascal. . . .

. . . I decided to try to re-write the Adventure Generator, this time making it easy to edit information that had previously been added. Again, I chose Pascal to do this. This was menu driven, and allowed 20 locations, 20 objects and 40 tasks."

	TAG isn't at the If Archive, as I write this, but Campbell has made it available at: 

 http://www.jcwild.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/tag.zip.

The 25 kb zip file file contains the interpreter, the generator, and Campell's own "Space" game!

	It seems a shame that any system - especially a clever one -- should have no literature aside from a game by its creator. So, since TAG doesn't require one to learn any programming language, I decided to create a quick game. Please understand, this doesn't use all of TAG's features. I believe it is permissible to include the interpreter with a game, so I have, but you'll "appreciate" the game more if you download the amazing little prehistoric generator, which will also give you Campbell's game and thus make you the proud possessor of the entire public history of TAG!

	Anyway, consider this my contribution to the museum of the Society for the Preservation of I-F Fabricators of Yore (SPIFFY).

	--Tony Ash
	flubbykat@yahoo.com