Winners of the 2001 IFComp

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1st place

All Roads

Cover art for All Roads

Jon Ingold

Wave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of paradise.

This work also won 1st place in the 2001 Miss Congeniality Awards.

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Score 7.45
Votes Cast 136
Standard Deviation 1.69

2nd place

Moments Out of Time

L. Ross Raszewski

Note: requires a Z6-capable interpreter, preferably with Blorb sound support.

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Score 7.43
Votes Cast 69
Standard Deviation 2.29

3rd place

Heroes

Sean Barrett

A most traditional CRPG experience.

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Score 6.94
Votes Cast 115
Standard Deviation 2.06

4th place

No Time To Squeal

Cover art for No Time To Squeal

Mike Sousa and Robb Sherwin

He thought he saw a pantomime

That queried his own deal:

He looked again, and found it was

A ticket to a meal.

He thought he saw infanticide

Per chance to make it real.

'I have but one regret,' he said:

'There is no time to squeal!'

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Score 6.81
Votes Cast 101
Standard Deviation 2.10

5th place

The Beetmonger's Journal

Cover art for The Beetmonger's Journal

Scott Starkey

Victor Lapot and I were miles from base camp on the south continent, once again hacking through previously unsurveyed lands and searching for forgotten cultures. The expedition reminded me of our grand adventures of old, that is, if I ignored Lapot's 100-man paparazzi tirelessly trailing us.

This work also won 2nd place in the 2001 Miss Congeniality Awards.

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Score 6.71
Votes Cast 111
Standard Deviation 1.91

6th place

Vicious Cycles

Simon Mark

This work also won 3rd place in the 2001 Miss Congeniality Awards.

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Score 6.63
Votes Cast 123
Standard Deviation 2.09

7th place

Best of Three

Cover art for Best of Three

Emily Short

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Score 6.60
Votes Cast 116
Standard Deviation 2.53

8th place

Earth and Sky

Cover art for Earth and Sky

Paul O'Brian

It's been almost a month since your parents disappeared. One Tuesday, they just didn't come home, and there's been no sign of them since.

For the University and the rest of the town, the mystery is beginning to pall. To those people, it's as if Claire and Scott Colborn suddenly stopped existing -- strange and inexplicable, to be sure, but forgettable in the long run. But for you it's as if the ground beneath your feet stopped existing, and you've been plummeting in freefall ever since.

Your brother Austin, though, has been a rock through the whole experience, handling the numbing details, the endless meetings with useless detectives, even sorting through Mom and Dad's lab in hopes of finding an answer.

Now you stand outside the lab door, clutching his note, hardly daring to hope that such an answer may have arrived at long last.

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Score 6.44
Votes Cast 118
Standard Deviation 1.73

9th place

Triune

Papillon

What are little girls Made of? Sugar and spice And everything nice That's what little girls Are made of.

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Score 6.40
Votes Cast 99
Standard Deviation 2.18

10th place

Film at Eleven

Bowen Greenwood

Welcome to a day in the life of Betty Byline!

Two months out of journalism school you enter the workplace with big time dreams of network television news. Fame, fortune and glory, all writ large under the unrelenting gaze of the klieg lights. There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and it's your job to tell them, tell them best, and tell them first.

Unfortunately this isn't the Naked City. This is Pleasantville, USA, population 50,000. And you're not exactly working for the network news. You're working for local television station KTKO, the Knockout News Team -- a one camera, one reporter operation with a fat, balding old news director who smokes cheap cigars. Forget fortune and glory, for now your big career objective is not to have to give too many on-air endorsements of 'Kletus's Used Car and Farm Implement Emporium.'

OK, so maybe you're not Dan Rather yet. Everybody has to start somewhere, and at least this is a start in front of a camera.

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Score 6.26
Votes Cast 115
Standard Deviation 1.71

11th place

Prized Possession

Kathleen M. Fischer

Winter, 1182

"Stay close," your mother whispers, wrapping her arms around you, pulling you back into the folds of her silky blue kirtle. She rests her cheek upon your head. "It will all be over soon."

Embers swirl around you, thrown from fires raging in the corner towers. You marvel at their brilliance, and at the pillars of flames soaring high into the cold November night. How can things so terrifying, be so beautiful? And then you hear the screams. Your mother's grip tightens, and looking up you see the tears in her eyes.

"I'm sorry, child," she says, "there is nothing we can do."

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Score 6.08
Votes Cast 109
Standard Deviation 1.98

12th place

Journey from an Islet

Mario Becroft

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Score 6.07
Votes Cast 110
Standard Deviation 1.93

13th place

Grayscale

Daniel Freas

"We really think you'll like this one, see you on the other side!" ...and suddenly the room is ripped away. Air slams into your chest as you struggle to breathe and inky blackness swirls in at the edge of your vision. Stars everywhere...and then nothing, the feeling of being underwater wraps itself around you.

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Score 5.91
Votes Cast 104
Standard Deviation 1.99

14th place

The Chasing

Anssi Räisänen

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Score 5.69
Votes Cast 64
Standard Deviation 1.89

15th place

The Coast House

Stephen Newton and Dan Newton

The mystery, for you, started two years ago.

"Come here, there's something I want to tell you," your old grandfather had said, "Quick, before your mother comes back in the room."

The smell of antiseptic and an unidentifiable odor that seemed to emanate from the very walls of the old-age home made you uncomfortable enough. The thought of your grandfather having a secret he wanted to share only made that unplanned visit to the Shady Pastures Convalescent Home all the more nerve-wracking.

"If you have any mind for it, go back to Dalton. Your Grandmother left something she wanted you to have." Before you could ask him specifics, he turned away as your Mom reentered the room with a bottle of water. The topic would not come up again, which was fine by you. No one in your family had been to the Dalton property since your grandmother died over eight years ago, and as far as you knew, the place could have burned down by now.

When you thought back to your childhood, you could remember spending the summers with your grandmother at the old house in Dalton, located on the Texas Gulf Coast. Grandma Eleanor Sorich always had smiles for you, and made you feel that she understood you better than you did yourself. When she eventually passed away, you were deeply saddened, as if you had lost one of your best friends.

Grandpa Sorich, on the other hand, was a different story. A bitter man who spent most of the time during your visits off by the Dalton Harbor with his drinking buddies. As far as you could tell, their marriage was more of convenience than love. At her funeral, he showed only the faintest hint of remorse. He spent the years after her death mostly silent in an old age home... until that visit.

It's been two years since your chat with Grandpa. In that time, you have often reflected back on the conversation, curious as to what would make your grandfather act in such a mysterious fashion, and curious about what your grandmother could've possibly wanted you have.

Finally, an unexpected road trip across the country has allowed you to make a brief detour at the old family property. You find yourself back in the draining heat of Dalton, Texas, assessing the old Sorich property your family all but abandoned years ago. It hasn't burned down, but indeed stood patiently waiting for someone to return. The house, like your grandfather, has not aged gracefully, and looks as if it too is just waiting out the rest of it's years....

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Score 5.66
Votes Cast 111
Standard Deviation 1.80

16th place (tie)

A Night Guest

Valentine Kopteltsev

If you're fond of bad poetry, you'll like this one. Also, it probably would make a valid entry for the Inventory Comp.

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Score 5.54
Votes Cast 112
Standard Deviation 2.05

16th place (tie)

Carma

Marnie Parker

A Glulx Inform romp (with graphics and music).

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Score 5.54
Votes Cast 83
Standard Deviation 2.18

18th place (tie)

Fusillade

Mike Duncan

Fusillade (fU - zi - lAd') n. - 1. (a) A simultaneous discharge of firearms. (b) a number of shots fired simultaneously or in rapid succession. (c) something that gives the effect of a fusillade (ex. a fusillade of ideas). (d) This game.

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Score 5.50
Votes Cast 114
Standard Deviation 2.35

18th place (tie)

Fine-Tuned

Cover art for Fine-Tuned

Dennis Jerz

Can Troy, the handsome daredevil autoist, live up to his "sterling" reputation? What secret threatens the career of the talented singer, Miss Melody Sweet? With the help of the mechanical genius Aloysius Pratt, can Troy and Melody thwart a madman's evil plan?

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Score 5.50
Votes Cast 111
Standard Deviation 2.19

20th place

The Evil Sorcerer

Gren Remoz

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Score 5.40
Votes Cast 110
Standard Deviation 1.76

21st place

The Gostak

Cover art for The Gostak

Carl Muckenhoupt @carlmuckenhoupt

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds. Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

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Score 5.35
Votes Cast 104
Standard Deviation 3.05

22nd place

The Isolato Incident

Anya Johanna DeNiro @adeniro

We need to save the kingdom! But...where is the kingdom? What are its bounds? Can history be distilled? Why do ghosts feign friendliness? We will make a quest of questions!

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Score 5.14
Votes Cast 69
Standard Deviation 1.97

23rd place

Crusade

John Gorenfeld

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Score 5.11
Votes Cast 118
Standard Deviation 2.11

24th place

2112

George K. Algire

A woman's voice crackles over the intercom of the Boeing 797 you are strapping yourself into securely. You've never traveled in space before, and the prospect has been turning your guts inside out since you reluctantly had your parents sign the permission slip. You take time to ponder: What will you find on Mars? What has humanity done with the landscape? Who have they trampled in the process?

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Score 4.96
Votes Cast 57
Standard Deviation 2.26

25th place

You Are Here

Roy Fisher

Dragons. Demons. Undead. An adventurer's perils are many. But in the world of MUDs, nothing is more dangerous than electronic sex...

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Score 4.94
Votes Cast 113
Standard Deviation 1.85

26th place

Elements

John Evans @Chaoseed

If humanity is defined by the games we play, then IF defines us as obsessed with magical caves.

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Score 4.90
Votes Cast 112
Standard Deviation 1.84

27th place

The Cruise

Norman Perlmutter

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Score 4.77
Votes Cast 104
Standard Deviation 1.95

28th place (tie)

Bane of the Builders

Bogdan Baliuc

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Score 4.71
Votes Cast 118
Standard Deviation 1.72

28th place (tie)

To Otherwhere and Back

Greg Ewing

This was originally going to be an entry in Emily Short's Walkthrough Competition, but I didn't quite get it finished in time. Rather than let all the work go to waste, I decided to resubmit it here. So, keep in mind that it's *meant* to be played in conjunction with the accompanying walkthrough file. If you want a challenge, you could try playing it without, but if you get stuck, consulting the walkthrough is not considered cheating!

That's not to say you have to stick to the walkthrough, though -- if you do, you'll miss a lot of background. So feel free to look around and experiment along the way. Have fun!

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Score 4.71
Votes Cast 65
Standard Deviation 1.70

30th place

Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country

Adam Thornton

Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country. A game months in the making. A game designed to stretch the limits of Glulx Inform, and completely shatter the boundaries of good taste. A game described by sentence fragments. A game so powerfully vile that it should not be experienced by the elderly, those under 3' 6", or those with weak hearts. Stiffy Makane. X-trek. Very, *very* alternative sexualities. Play at your own risk.

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Score 4.67
Votes Cast 90
Standard Deviation 2.60

31st place

Kallisti

James Mitchelhill

This game may, as they say, contain scenes of a sexual nature and language unsuitable for the young and/or easily offended.

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Score 4.22
Votes Cast 106
Standard Deviation 2.24

32nd place (tie)

Colours

Cover art for Colours

J. Robinson Wheeler

Out of the TextFire "12-pack", this is an April's Fool game "demo" all about colours - you need to change the sterile world you're in into a truly blue experience." This was never a TextFire game.

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Score 4.15
Votes Cast 123
Standard Deviation 1.98

32nd place (tie)

The Cave of Morpheus

Mark Silcox

Peer Through The Looking Glass - and watch breathlessly as the two most original thinkers of the 20th Century - Sigmund Freud and Willie Crowther - wage a pitched battle for the soul of a defenseless college freshman named Steve!

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Score 4.15
Votes Cast 59
Standard Deviation 1.94

32nd place (tie)

Silicon Castles

David Given

Please note: this game uses some of the more exotic features of the Z-machine. It's known to fail on some interpreters on some systems, due to interpreter bugs. The game will attempt to detect these bugs and warn you before it starts, but I strongly recommend that you get a well-established, standard terp. It was developed on Frotz, and that is what I recommend. Enjoy yourself.

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Score 4.15
Votes Cast 118
Standard Deviation 2.34

35th place

Timeout

Stephen Hilderbrand

You were minding your own business, doing the work of The Computer, hard at work on the floor of Plastic Factory K, inhaling plastic fumes for a bed-slot in the increasingly hip and high-rent Alpha Complex. Pull this lever, push that button; your life had become a routine in some vast Ueberplan thought up by The Computer, the "benevolent" master of all you know.

That is, until today.

You have never been outside Alpha Complex, and have never heard stories of anyone else ever venturing beyond the elephantine walls, you have never had a thought of venturing that way.

That is, until today.

This morning, you had a vision of something strange, something unusual, but altogether beautiful. Maybe because it seemed your first independent thought, if there is such a concept, but for some reason you were overcome with the vision. As you worked diligently at your post, reaching and pulling and prying and piercing in a repetitive motion in time with the machines which had always surrounded your workdays, a piece of paper drifted to the soil against a backdrop of the most verdant green. It was the most luminous, life-affirming vision you had ever seen! The image bounced upside-down against your ocular cavity, and you fainted on the the floor of the assembly line.

What followed was a bright orange light, probably shone into your eyes by one of the foreman bots that watches the floor of the megalithic factory for any strange, unusual, unexpected happenings. You, TEND-IR-FUT, are overjoyed by this light.

You awake, only to find yourself on the floor of Plastic Factory K, your eternal nightmare...

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Score 4.10
Votes Cast 91
Standard Deviation 1.76

36th place

Begegnung am Fluss

Florian Edlbauer

Wenn du über den Fluss kommst, hast du es geschafft. Dort ist der Wald so dicht, dass sie dich nie finden.

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Score 4.09
Votes Cast 32
Standard Deviation 3.00

37th place (tie)

an apple from nowhere

Brendan Barnwell

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Score 3.99
Votes Cast 100
Standard Deviation 2.22

37th place (tie)

Stranded

Rich Cummings

(How long have I been unconscious?......What happened?) Suddenly it all comes rushing back to you...the pilot...the plane blindly drifting towards the ocean...jumping...That's all you can remember before you blacked out and washed ashore. You appear to be on a small island. Standing up, sharp pains streak down your back like electricity. In the immediate area, you find your pack...empty. "Great", you mutter to yourself. You check your pockets and find them empty as well. "No one knows where I am." The hot morning sun burns brightly overhead as you listen to waves crashing on a nearby shore...

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Score 3.99
Votes Cast 75
Standard Deviation 1.66

39th place

Schroedinger's Cat

James Willson

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Score 3.85
Votes Cast 115
Standard Deviation 2.02

40th place

Stick it to the man

Brendan Barnwell

I'm looking at this blank wall. What the fuck? Man, I wake up in the funkiest places. Oh, yeah, it's this bedroom. We're squatting this house -- right, right. Sheesh, crowded, man. Whoa, I'm groggy. Shouldn't sit up so fast. There's Brad, over there; late-sleeping bastard. What the fuck time is it anyway? Aren't I supposed to be somew-- Oh, right, the rally's today. Well, that's not till later -- it can't be later than like 8 now. Still, better get up. Shit, where are my clothes? Ah, there we go. I'm a little hungry. Hmm, I wonder if Gary's got any food out there. What the fuck time is it, anyway?

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Score 3.84
Votes Cast 80
Standard Deviation 1.98

41st place

Jump

Chris Mudd

The first slivers of light rise from the horizon. Colours, hues gather... A gull rides a thermal to the clouds above. All that has happened seems inconsequential.

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Score 3.76
Votes Cast 116
Standard Deviation 1.95

42nd place

Volcano Isle

Paul DeWitt

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Score 3.75
Votes Cast 96
Standard Deviation 1.69

43rd place

Mystery Manor

Dana Crane

You have been driving down this dusty dirt road for nearly 45 minutes now, when a light rain begins to fall. You have spent the past two hours driving on the interstate, and are anxious to get to the manor, which you purchased at a reduced rate. It seems that it has been on the market for a few years, and no one was even interested in it the house, because of the strange disappearance of the family that lived there. You go through the stories in your mind about the family that lived here. You dismiss all the stories you have heard about the family being abducted by aliens, walking away from their lives, a crazy murderer killing them and eating their rotting flesh. It is all nonsense to you. You'll have pleanty of time to go through the house, and just maybe you'll find out the truth.

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Score 3.31
Votes Cast 51
Standard Deviation 1.52

44th place

Invasion of the Angora-fetish Transvestites from the Graveyards of Jupiter

Morten Rasmussen

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Score 2.96
Votes Cast 52
Standard Deviation 1.67

45th place

SURREAL

Matthew Lowe

welcome to a new world..... ....a surreal world > You are standing on a weather-worn cliff top over looking a pale blue lake.The lake is de-oxygenated giving it it's pale blue colour. All around you tall mountains rise from the ground giving a picturesque view. Wind tossed soil covers the ground where trees grow giving a deep and healthy colour. Leading away from the cliff are two well travelled paths; one leading to the east and the other to the west.

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Score 2.87
Votes Cast 63
Standard Deviation 1.52

46th place

Goofy

Ricardo Dague

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Score 2.71
Votes Cast 83
Standard Deviation 1.46

47th place

The Test

Matt Dark Baron

Less than 3 minutes before the most important test of your life involving english and maths together, you are thrown into somewhere else (it doesn't really matter). Although you don't have to do the test there, you might be thrown onto a conveyer leading into the teeth of a giant machine. You've got to get out. Warning: This game is hard and requires large amount of thinking power, do not attempt if you expect to complete it in 5 minutes. Hints are available, and for the faint hearted a walk through.

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Score 2.48
Votes Cast 56
Standard Deviation 1.75

48th place

Lovesong

Mihalis Georgostathis

When a boy loves a girl, he can do amazing things. Let the hero of the game do something much simpler

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Score 2.38
Votes Cast 56
Standard Deviation 1.43

49th place

The Newcomer

Jason Love

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Score 2.17
Votes Cast 100
Standard Deviation 1.45

50th place

The Last Just Cause

Jeremy Carey-Dressler

The Last Just Cause.... What if you were completely sane in an insane world? What if other's wished to destroy you because of your sanity? What if this insane world's people only truly cared about themselves? What if there hate had completely consumed them? What would you do? What if you had the ability to fix the problems? Well I believe you can, if you can make it out of the world's oppressive powers? Then the next question is, how would you fix the problems? Nicely, in an understanding, but firm way or with a cruel iron fist? Everything is in your hands... Now you must choose your destiny, and perform The Last Just Cause.

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Score 1.86
Votes Cast 57
Standard Deviation 1.11

51st place

You Were Doomed From the Start

Jeremy Carey-Dressler

I must find keys.... For it is key to many lives. Key's are the beginning and the end.... And the key to your success!

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Score 1.72
Votes Cast 81
Standard Deviation 1.42

The organizer of the 2001 Annual Interactive Fiction Competition was Stephen Granade.