Stefan Vogt’s Retro Collection

poly.play recently acquired an extensive collection of retro hardware, software, and literature. The retro collection comes from Stefan Vogt, himself the author of numerous modern text and graphic adventures such as “Hibernated,” “The Curse of Rabenstein,” and “The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor,” and accordingly, there is a clear focus on interactive fiction and the tools used to create such games in the past.

In addition to classic computers from Commodore, Atari, and Sinclair, the collection also includes systems such as the Acorn Electron, Dragon 32, Oric, Philips MSX, and the ZX Spectrum Next. It also features drives, monitors, accessories, and, in some cases, very complete sets with original packaging and documentation.

The software is particularly exciting. Several Infocom classics are part of the collection, including A Mind Forever Voyaging, Planetfall, Stationfall, Enchanter, and Wishbringer. To this day, Infocom stands out like no other name when it comes to sophisticated text adventures of the 1980s: complex parsers, sophisticated stories, and worlds created largely through language alone.

At least as interesting are the Adventure Creators in the collection. With The Quill, The Illustrator, The Professional Adventure Writing System, and the Graphic Adventure Creator, several key tools are represented that allowed amateur and professional developers in the 1980s to create their own adventures.

The Quill by Gilsoft made the development of text adventures accessible to a significantly larger user base for the first time. With The Illustrator, these games could then be enhanced with graphics. The later Professional Adventure Writing System (PAW) took the concept much further, offering a more powerful parser, graphics capabilities, and more extensive options for game logic. The collection includes a particularly beautiful Spectrum version with an additional cassette for the Spectrum +3, as well as a personal bonus from Zenobi Software.

An important alternative was the Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC) from Incentive Software. It, too, combined adventure logic, a parser, and a graphics editor in a single package. Stefan’s collection includes versions for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

In addition, there are some unusual items, such as an original Gilsoft print template, historical documents, and a Thimbleweed Park card set signed by Ron Gilbert. It is precisely this mix of games, development tools, and documents that makes the collection interesting: It shows not only what people played back then, but also how these adventure games were created.