They say everyone has a novel in them – in the mid-Eighties, Hampshire-based Incentive Software believed the same was true of adventure games. In 1985, it launched The Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC), a utility that combined the text creation facility of Gilsoft’s popular The Quill and its companion add-on, The Illustrator. Now, fans of the genre could, without any programming experience, create bespoke worlds and adventures, with only their imaginations and artistic skills to limit them.
The Graphic Adventure Creator was the brainchild of Amstrad CPC owner Sean Ellis. Sean’s inspiration came from a ZX81 text adventure called , one of several programs in Trevor Toms’ . Trevor’s system introduced Sean to data-driven programming via counters, markers and its base role as an interpreter for a set of command strings. The young programmer soon began