| Start-up screen of The Quill |
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The Quill (or The Quill Adventure System as the full name is) is program to write adventure games. It's written by Graeme Yeandle and was published by Gilsoft in 1983 and quickly gained a loyal following.
The idea that was to become The Quill was forst hatched in 1981 or 1982 when Graeme Yeandle played an adventure game from Artic Computing. He had earlier read an article by Ken Reed in the August 1980 issue of Practical Computing and it appeard 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 made the adventure Timeline and had it published by Gilsoft, but it was tedious to use so he started working on an editor for it and the result was The Quill. The Quill was then ported to 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. Norace in Norway made versions in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. A version for Amstrad CPC 464 was also made.
The Quill only allowed text only adventures (interactive fiction) using a verb noun parser. Later an add-on called The Illustrator was made to allow using graphics. Later a secong generation Quill was produced with more capabilities and sold as Professional Adventure Writer.