GC: A Thrashing Parity Bit of the Mind
======================================

GC is a text-adventure game written for the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory Olympics, a competition held between four teams of about 40
people each, mostly graduate students, professors, and secretarial staff,
over a two-week long period every January.  The text adventure was only one
event out of about 20.  It was scored by time essentially- the first team
to complete the game won, the last team lost.  The game ended up being very
popular, and kept a great number of people from performing any work at all
over about an 80 hour time stretch.  It also inspired a lot of cooperative
effort.

The game was popular not just because it has some good puzzles, but also
because it created a world replete with humorous and interesting references
to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics and Physics, and
the people of the MIT AI Lab.  Because of this the game is not likely to be
nearly so enjoyable for others who have no relation to the MIT AI Lab or
any of these fields.  But it is not entirely MIT-specific.  A very few
changes would make the game fun for almost any other university Computer
Science department, for instance.  The game is quite difficult, and not
necessarily a good game for individual play.  It was designed to be played
by a team- during actual competition each team had an average of about 8
people working hard at it.

For those familiar with TADS, the game requires the allocation of an
unusually large amount of heap memory and memory for the symbol table,
and plays slowly on low power machines.

 ======================================

 Notes by Neil K., January 25, 1993:
 
 This zip file contains the game file for the TADS text adventure GC:
A Thrashing Parity Bit of the Mind, written by Carl de Marcken,
David Baggett and Pearl Tsai from MIT. TADS stands for the Text
Adventure Development System, which is a shareware system for
designing text adventures, written by Michael J. Roberts. You need
a copy of TADS interpreter that can run on your system - available
at ftp.gmd.de and many other fine ftp sites - to make use of this
game file.

 The original distribution of the GC source was a compressed tar
archive. This file was packed into zip format for uploading to the
if-archive at ftp.gmd.de by Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca) with
permission from the authors.

 Some filenames are different from the original distribution as many
users of the if-archive have DOS machines. Unfortunately DOS is
saddled with an irritating 8 + 3 character uppercase-only filename
convention, so I had to rename some files to accommodate DOS and
Windows users.

 Source code for this game is available at ftp.gmd.de in the
directory /if-archive/games/source/tads, but for space reasons the
source code has been removed from this distribution. In addition
several megabytes of scanned colour images from the GC manual have
been removed; again for space reasons.

 ======================================

 Contents:

 This archive contains the following files:

intro.txt         The file you are reading. This is a modified
                  version of the "README" file included with the
                  original distribution.
gc.gam            The portable binary game file of the game itself
                  that can be played using any TADS interpreter -
                  version 2.1 or later.
readme.mit        A file the MIT AI Lab teams got, describing the
                  scoring system used and how to play the game.
                  This file was called "Readme" in the original
                  distribution.
announce          A promotional message sent out about the game.
                  This file was called "announcement" in the
                  original distribution.
notes.mit         A list of things that may need to be made known
                  or changed for the game to be played outside of
                  the MIT AI Laboratory. This file was named
                  "mit-specific" in the original distribution.
instruct.mit      Some information for people who have never played
                  text adventures before. This file was named
                  "our-instructions" in the original distribution.
instruct.tad      More information for people who have never played
                  text adventures before, or who are unfamiliar with
                  TADS. This file was named "tads-instructions" in
                  the original.
welcome           Some text from the game's brochure/manual, as
                  distributed to AI Lab players.