2003.03.18

My wife, always persistent in her efforts to keep house, recently came across an old manila envelope in the back of one of my storage closets.  I recognized it immediately as a registration package I had devised for my old game, "The Wade Wars, Book III".

WadeWar3 was my first real work of interactive fiction, written in QuickBasic and eventually compiled using VisualBasic 1.0 for DOS.  I like to tell myself that I'm a relatively young man, but let's just say that it was more truth and less lie back then.  At the time, I was absolutely positive that I was about to step in and fill the void left by the fallen Infocom.  I would build the Text Adventure Empire anew with my five planned books of Wade.  I would be the undisputed, heavy-weight champion of... well, everything. 

I created a shareware version of the game, uploaded it to the Shareware Distribution Network, and prepared a series of registration packages with a registered version of the game. I opened a mailbox and prepared to dominate the market... and as many young men do, I lost interest.
 
Years later, around the turn of the millennium, I stumbled upon GMD and found my game... the game which I had worked on for years, the game to which the source code no longer even existed... my all but forgotten game.  It was preserved at the archive in just the same form that I had sent it to SDN!  And low and behold... people in this e-community called "RGIF" were still actually playing it!  It seemed ironic that I intended to introduce IF players to my game.  In a sense, it was my game that introduced me to the IF players.  

For the record, despite its classification as "shareware", it's not really been shareware for ten years, and it has been sitting in the archive unchanged for historical purposes.  A historical record of value primarily only to me, and perhaps whoever uploaded it there. I can't help but feel after finding it again that this registered disk, which has remained in the bottom of a sealed manila envelope for ten years, belongs there too.  

So it is, with fond memories, that I send this "registered" version of the "Wade Wars, Book III" to the archive. 

It's interesting what perspective a decade will bring to a person.  

Jim Fisher