The Quill
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- This article discusses the adventure game writing program. For other usages of the word quill, please refer to Quill (disambiguation).
The Quill (or The Quill Adventure System as its full name is) is a program to write home computer adventure games. Written by Graeme Yeandle, it was published by Gilsoft in 1983 and quickly gained a loyal following. Although available to the general public, it was used by several games companies to create best-selling titles, including The Hobbit.
The idea that was to become The Quill was first hatched in 1981 or 1982 when Graeme Yeandle played an adventure game published by Artic Computing. He had earlier read an article by Ken Reed in the August 1980 issue of Practical Computing and it appeared to him the adventure was written using the information in that article, so he started thinking about writing his own adventure system on the ZX Spectrum. He did so and with it wrote the game Timeline, which was published by Gilsoft, but it was tedious to use so he started working on an editor for it and the result was The Quill.
After the original ZX Spectrum version, The Quill was ported to the Commodore 64 and was sold in North America as Adventure Writer by Codewriter, Inc. (It is possible that they also made a version in French.) Norwegian company Norace made versions in Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish. A version for the Amstrad CPC home computer range was also made. The Quill only allowed for the creation of text only adventures (also called interactive fiction), using a text interpretation process known as a verb–noun parser. Later an add-on called The Illustrator was made to let the user include graphics in the adventures.
Following the success of the original, a second generation Quill was produced with more capabilities and sold under the name Professional Adventure Writer.
