This archive is a home for interactive fiction (aka IF) games,
development tools, game solutions, and programming examples, and for
the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction.
We want this site to be a place where all things related to the art
(and science) of interactive fiction can be consolidated.

We have collected as much as time permitted from many places all over
the world.  You may help us and the users of this archive by uploading
missing items. You can either upload using the web form at
http://ifarchive.org/cgi-bin/upload.py or using FTP to the directory
/incoming/. If you use FTP, you will need to also upload a text file
explaining what it is, and on what machines it runs. If we can't make
heads or tails of an anonymous upload, we'll probably just delete it,
so if it's unclear please upload an explanation with your submission.
(Note that the old email address for submissions has had to be
disabled due to the volume of spam it received.)

The archive makes no blanket claim about the copyright status of the
archive files. Unless a file, its included license, or its description
explicitly states that it is in the public domain, then the file's
copyright rests with its author and the file is only available on the
archive for personal use. You may freely download games and play them,
and the games and files can be made available for download from the
Archive and its official mirrors. The files and games on the archive
may not be compiled for commercial distribution without permission
from each and every author of the files you would like to
distribute. Note that commercial distribution includes selling games
or game compilations on online auction sites.

If you prefer to download from a site closer to you, this archive is mirrored
on the following web sites

in the USA:         http://mirror.ifarchive.org/
                    http://ifarchive.plover.net/
                    http://ifarchive.jmac.org/
                    http://ifarchive.flavorplex.com/
                    http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/interactive-fiction/
                    http://ifarchive.smallwhitehouse.org/
                    http://ifarchive.wurb.com/
in Ireland:         http://ifarchive.heanet.ie/
in Austria:         http://ifarchive.giga.or.at/

FTP based mirrors are also available

in the USA:         ftp://ftp.ifarchive.com/if-archive/
                    ftp://ifarchive.plover.net/if-archive/
                    ftp://ftp.guetech.org/if-archive/
                    ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/interactive-fiction/
in Austria:         ftp://ftp.giga.or.at/pub/ifarchive/
in Finland:         ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/

In addition, as well as this ftp site ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/ the archive can
be accessed through http://www.ifarchive.org/, which translates the structure
of the archive to HTML pages and displays the text from the Index files
together with the file names.

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Three files in this directory may be of special interest to you:

directory-tree  contains a structured list of all the subdirectories,
ls-lR           contains a list of all the file names and sizes in the archive,
Master-Index    contains all the Index files from all the subdirectories,
                i.e. it contains descriptions of all the files in the archive.

ls-lR and Master-Index are automatically updated every morning (local time),
directory-tree is maintained manually and should always be current.

Other places for new visitors to visit are the file info/playgame.FAQ
- Playing the Interactive Fiction Archive Games, by Stephen Griffiths -
and the directory 'starters', which contains starter kits for new players.

If you have problems unpacking a file on your particular machine (e.g. a .zip
file on a Macintosh) look in directory download-tools and there in the sub-
directory for your machine type; you may find the necessary tools there. If
you think some important tool is missing, please upload it to the
/incoming/directory mentioned above.

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Archive Maintainers:

David Kinder
Stephen Granade

Past Archive Maintainers:

Volker Blasius
David M. Baggett

Technical Maintenance:

Goob and Zarf      tech .at. ifarchive .dot. org