If you're interested in Interactive Fiction, both past and present, you have to check out the Interactive Fiction Communtiy Forum. You'll find chatter about new and older games, competitions, and even assistance if you're trying to write your own in an IF language like Hugo, TADS, or Inform.

      Prowler Productions - The Future: We've been... well... idle for a long time. No projects are in the works, although a couple were started. I took our CGI scripts (ProwlerPoll and JabberChat) offline, since we were seeing more piracy (i.e., people stripping off our copyright notice without paying for a license) than registrations. I wrote these text adventures as personal projects, and that's about all. Lunatix Online is still online, but the player base has shrunk to a very close-knit community of mostly long-time players. StarLock is still up (and as unfinished as before), although it may be phased out and taken offline when it becomes clear nobody at all is playing.

      We always were a very small company -- more hobby than business -- and I guess real life has caught up. Anna moved years ago (making project coordination difficult), and I'm now married with three kids. Inspiration and motivation just aren't forthcoming these days.

      Then there's the game market, and the current economy. With AJAX and technologies not widely in use when Lunatix Online and StarLock were created, another browser-based effort could be pretty slick now. Browser-based games are now a dime-a-dozen, though, and most are free with a certain kind of "strategy" gameplay that really appeals to folks. For all the effort put into a new BBG, it still might be no more than a blip on the gaming radar.

      And then there's the general twisting of the term "browser-based game," where Flash and Java and Silverlight are called "BBG" even though they're nothing of the sort (i.e., they are web-based, but they are NOT html, which is the definition of browser-based). My day job has me programming in C# and ASP.Net. I have 22 years of programming experience in general. I could probably move on to the next thing -- maybe single-player real-time 3D games for Windows (i.e., games people may actually play) -- but time and motivation continue to be lacking.

      The Wall Street Journal Online ran this article about IF and the competition. My interview was a lot longer than the single comment used in the article (and yeah, I play console games, and I know what a pause button is), but it's a good read nonetheless.

      Although I'm unaware of any new reviews based on the updated version (1.8), these are a few of the more favorable reviews for the 1.6 competition version: #1 | #2 | #3 | #4