While Storytronics is very far removed from such adolescent nonsense, it is distantly related with computer games - the inventor of Storytronics, Chris Crawford, was also one of the great pioneers of the computer games industry, and its greatest thinker, until, in the early nineties, he grew tired of its repetitive, simplistic, violent products, and left to set his sights on interactive storytelling.

Crawford had been leaning towards a people-oriented form of interactive entertainment for most of his computer games career. He created Gossip, a simple game of interpersonal intrigue where the goal is to gossip oneself into popularity, and later integrated it into his unique Excalibur computer game. Even his famed, deep, strategy games, like Guns & Butter or the blockbuster hit Balance of Power, contained interpersonal interaction in the form of diplomatic negotiations, which were far more nuanced and emotionally rich than in any other strategy game ever made. In 1987, while most game designers were making simple two-dimensional action games, he created Trust and Betrayal, a large-scale strategy game which is centered entirely on interpersonal intrigue, played out through conversations with six computer-controlled characters, each of which has a unique personality.

But Crawford was aiming ever higher. Leaving the gaming industry behind, he set out to create a truly interactive story. In his search for funding, Crawford came into contact with the Markle foundation, who proposed an even worthier goal - to create a general purpose technology which will allow anyone with storytelling talent to create an interactive story. Crawford eagerly took up the challenge, and in 1998 he released Erasmatron, an early version of Storytronics, named after the great thinker and humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. While Erasmatron was a viable technology, experience proved that storybuilders needed a more powerful authoring tool, players needed a better way of interacting with the storyworld Actors, and both needed a method of publishing storyworlds to allow widespread access. For the eight years that followed, Crawford invested his incredible energy and vision in perfecting Storytronics in these areas. It wasn’t an easy ride, but Storytron.com is now proud to present the unprecedented fruit of his well-spent efforts.