Since this is my first blog post on Built In Chicago, I thought I'd give everyone a quick rundown of my company, Textfyre.
Textfyre is a publisher and cheerleader of New Media, specifically Interactive Fiction. So what is Interactive Fiction? It is essentially the old text adventure medium brought forward with better tools, theories, content, and higher quality user interfaces.
You can read about the history of Interactive Fiction throughout the Internet, starting from Will Crowther and Don Woods Adventure creation, to the infamous MIT Zork (aka Dungeon), later commercialized through the company Infocom. Infocom when on to publish numerous top 10 selling Interactive Fiction titles in the 1980's, before bowing to overwhelming competition from the video game industry. An enthusiastic and extraordinarily talented hobbyist community expanded the medium through Usenet and the Web to bring it out of the dark ages of mazes and treasure hunts to today's world of high quality stories enriched with brilliant interaction.
A few years ago, one of the tool developers created Inform 7 (inform7.com), an integrated development editor specifically for creating new Interactive Fiction works. Not only that, but it uses a natural-language like syntax that makes the source code highly readable.
With the advent if Inform 7, I decided to pursue the creation of a commercial publishing venture for Interactive Fiction. I started before smart phones were so popular, so Textfyre's focus was desktops and Silverlight based web interfaces. In the last 18 months we dramatically changed gears, rewriting our main game engine to work on any mobile platform as a service, with the intent to push content to the Kindle, Android, iPad, and any other mobile device available.
We're on the verge of launching a brand new web portal for Interactive Fiction, as well as publishing our stories to those aforementioned mobile platforms, as well as integrating content with Facebook. We will be able to integrate our stories using social networking connections, putting the reader directly into the story.
The coming months are exciting times at Textfyre. We're on the cusp of breaking out of start-up mode and building something extraordinary.
