Past Present, an interactive short story

A Dreamers Travel Destination, L. Whittaker (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Some of you know my day job is computer programming, but you might not know the reason I first became drawn to the infernal machines: I wanted to write video games.

One youthful goal in particular was to write an interactive fiction—another term for a “text adventure,” a type of video game that was quite popular in the 1980s. Instead of relying on graphics, sounds, and animation, it’s a game where the player reads descriptions and...