This archive is a home for public domain and shareware interactive fiction
(aka IF) games, development tools, game solutions, and programming examples,
and for the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction.
We want this site to be a place where all things related to the art (and
science) of interactive fiction can be consolidated.

We have collected as much as time permitted from many places all over the world.
You may help us and the users of this archive by uploading missing items to
directory /incoming/ and sending email to us explaining what it is, and on what
machines it runs. If we can't make heads or tails of an anonymous upload, we'll
probably just delete it, so if it's unclear what it is please email us about it.

Emails about uploads should be sent to

    David Kinder (d.kinder@btinternet.com) and
    Stephen Granade (sgranade@phy.duke.edu)

If you prefer to download from a site closer to you, this archive is mirrored

in the USA:         http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/
                    http://ftp.ndn.net/mirrors/if-archive/
                    ftp://ftp.ifarchive.com/if-archive/
                    ftp://www.plover.net/if-archive/
                    ftp://ftp.guetech.org/if-archive/
in Finland:         ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/misc/if-archive/
in Australia:       http://www.planetmirror.com/pub/if-archive/
                    ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/if-archive/
in England:         ftp://mirror.holmoak.co.uk/if-archive/

In addition, as well as this ftp site ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/ the archive can
be accessed through http://www.ifarchive.org/, which translates the structure
of the archive to HTML pages and displays the text from the Index files
together with the file names.

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Three files in this directory may be of special interest to you:

directory-tree  contains a structured list of all the subdirectories,
ls-lR           contains a list of all the file names and sizes in the archive,
Master-Index    contains all the Index files from all the subdirectories,
                i.e. it contains descriptions of all the files in the archive.

ls-lR and Master-Index are automatically updated every morning (local time),
directory-tree is maintained manually and should always be current.

Other places for new visitors to visit are the file info/playgame.FAQ
- Playing the Interactive Fiction Archive Games, by Stephen Griffiths -
and the directory 'starters', which contains starter kits for new players.

If you have problems unpacking a file on your particular machine (e.g. a .zip
file on a Macintosh) look in directory download-tools and there in the sub-
directory for your machine type; you may find the necessary tools there. If
you think some important tool is missing, please upload it to the
/incoming/directory mentioned above.

                                    - - -

Archive Maintainers:

David Kinder       d.kinder@btinternet.com
Stephen Granade    sgranade@phy.duke.edu

Past Archive Maintainers:

Volker Blasius
David M. Baggett

Technical Maintenance:

Goob and Zarf      gorf@ifarchive.org