Andrew Plotkin

Andrew Plotkin (born May 15, 1970), also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.

Interactive fiction

Plotkin was one of the earliest writers to use Graham Nelson's Inform development system, and one of the first since Infocom's heyday to explore the boundaries of interactive fiction as an artistic medium. Many later authors cite him as a primary influence. He has won many awards within the community, and is frequently interviewed for magazine articles about interactive fiction.

Plotkin has also made major technical contributions to the interactive fiction medium, designing the Blorb archive format, the Glk I/O platform, and the Glulx virtual machine, and implementing Glulx Inform and several interactive fiction interpreters for the Macintosh and X. The Glk API has made possible the creation of "universal translator" interpreters such as Gargoyle, a single program capable of running all interactive fiction formats.