Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: nntp.gmd.de!news.ruhr-uni-bochum.de!news.uni-stuttgart.de!news.belwue.de!fu-berlin.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!uni-erlangen.de!gs.dfn.de!scsing.switch.ch!swsbe6.switch.ch!surfnet.nl!news.nic.surfnet.nl!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!news3.noc.netcom.net!zdc!zippo!user10
From: paulo@mail.ddnet.es (Paulo Jan)
Subject: Greetings from Spain
X-Newsreader: News Xpress Version 1.0 Beta #3
Sender: usenet@news.zippo.com
Nntp-Posting-Host: user10.ddnet.es
Organization: Zippo
Message-ID: <DMoJwL.1z0@news.zippo.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 21:31:01 GMT
Lines: 49

Hi all:

	First of all, let me introduce myself: my name is Paulo Jan, 
and I am a spanish interactive-fiction player and (wanna-be) 
programmer. After reading this newsgroup for a while I've decided to 
post to tell you something about the interactive-fiction in my 
country, Spain. It might be an interesting question for most of you, 
since I read a thread about non-english IF games a couple of months 
ago; unfortunately, I haven't had time to write this until today, 
and maybe the topic isn't actual anymore.
	Well, the state of the interactive-fiction games in Spain 
can be considered as... "warm" (not very hot, but at least it 
exists). There are several groups and clubs dedicated to these kind 
of games, and I belong myself to the most important of them, called 
CAAD. In this moment, my club is launching a programming contest for 
IF games, with a first prize of 100.000 pesetas (500 pounds, more or 
less), hoping that this will attract more people to the world of IF, 
and we also run other activities, like a fanzine that we edit for 
our members. If you want more info about the contest, you can either 
mail me or to the address "lince@micaco.encomix.com", which belongs 
to the president of our club, Juanjo Munoz.
	What kind of IF games are the most popular in Spain? Well, 
as far as I can see, the IF scene on the Internet if greatly 
influenced by the heritage of Infocom; this is not true for Spain, 
because most of us started in this world with a Spectrum or an 
Amstrad, and of course, the games that influenced us most were the 
ones that were available for them, such as the Scott Adams' ones or 
the Level 9 ones, and specially "Gremlins" by Brian Howarth, which 
was one of the few games translated to spanish in those times
(I mean 1984-1985). These roots can be seen in many details of the 
spanish games: for example, most of them have static graphics 
(actually a trick to attract the shoot'em-up fans, who were the 
majority of the game market, to a world in which you had to... type 
the orders?), and the spanish game-writing systems are very 
different from TADS and the other object-oriented systems
that you can find on the net. Most of them have integrated 
environments for game creation, so that, instead of giving a large 
piece of "source code" to the program to be "compiled", you have to 
enter the data in each section of the program. If I have time, I'll 
upload some of these systems to ftp.gmd.de, so that you can see 
them.
	Well, I think that the above is enough for one post. I'm 
having lots of troubles with my news server (in fact, I'm using a 
public-accesible one) and I can't read the groups every day, so if 
you have a question, please mail me.

					Regards,

						Paulo.
