I just saw the announcement on the ifMUD today.

I think I missed the tail end of AGT's heyday by a year or two (in terms of when I found the online IF community). Some notable games (or so I hear, I still don't think I have beaten any of them) were released after that point, but for the most part, AGT seemed like a dried riverbed. Still, one could sense that it had been a big river that had reshaped the land we all found ourselves on. I feel like the IF Comp may have not existed if the AGT comps hadn't existed before it, although I'm not going to go read up and refresh my memory on whether there was any actual connection. No matter what, they were there first.

So I didn't ever dig much into trying to use AGT myself or had any reason to e-mail David Malmberg, but I always thought of him as one of the giants of IF, integral to our history.

I hope he had a good life.

RIP, David Malmberg. That's sad news. I found AGT to be a lot of fun to play around with -- it's very easy to get started with it. A lot of people who wrote AGT games weren't really programmers which is probably why a lot of those adventures were so idiosyncratic and colorful (I mean that both literally and figuratively). The parser responsiveness did often leave a lot to be desired, granted, but it was still a cool development system in my book.

One thing I've always meant to do is try to track down and play some more of the games entered in the old yearly AGT competitions.

The author of AGT passed away.

https://intfiction.org/t/remembering-da ... berg/60778

Bryan or Roody (or anyone) did either of you guys ever try it out?