AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit) - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

David Malmberg's 1987 extension on Mark J. Welch's earlier 1985 GAGS (Generic Adventure Game System) provided a simple, Pascal-like system for would-be late '80s game developers to create text adventures for (primarily) MS-DOS systems through a process of filling in database blanks to instruct an existing text adventure engine. Similar work was done earlier with Gilsoft's The Quill on C64 (etc.), and in 1993 Graham Nelson's work on Inform would fly where AGT games merely ran... but in 1994 Inform hadn't escaped the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup and percolated down to the BBS sphere yet, so we worked with such old tools as we had available.

Mist Classic had periods of feast and famine where access to pro bono emag programmer labour was concerned, so after taking this engine for a whimsical spin for a 1997 Blender (#40) compo entry ("Mad Cow Man and Deep-Fried Beef Fat Boy", awaiting a 30th anniversary remastering in Inform) we suffered the mental contortion needed to envision using a text adventure as a medium in which to present the textual content of the long-delayed 14th issue of our house electronic magazine, Kithe, later that year -- possibly the last major project ever released using its engine! (and definitely one of the weirdest!)

AGT games can be interpreted through the AGiliTy interpreter for modern systems (Windows, SCUMMVM), and there is even a technique allowing them to be bridged to BBSes and run as door games.