Tads

TADS (Text Adventure Development System) is an authoring toolkit for building parser-driven interactive fiction in the Infocom tradition. The Macintosh distribution archived here packages the compiler and run-time so authors can write text adventures on the Mac and play the resulting story files on the same machine.

Origins

TADS was created by Michael J. Roberts and released as shareware in the late 1980s. It became one of the two dominant IF authoring systems of the 1990s alongside Inform, and remains in use today through later TADS 2 and TADS 3 releases.

What it does

The system compiles a high-level, C-like source language into a portable game file that the run-time interpreter executes. Authors define rooms, objects, actors, verbs and grammar, and TADS handles parsing the player's typed commands and dispatching them against the world model.

The Macintosh build

This Info-Mac distribution provides the classic-Mac compiler and interpreter as a Compact Pro archive. It targets System 6 and System 7 era machines and produces story files that are compatible with TADS interpreters on other platforms.

Audience

The package is aimed at hobbyist IF authors rather than end-players. To actually play a story you compile or download a separate .gam file and run it through the included interpreter.