1987-1988 Rainbird Software
Platform: IBM PC
To coincide with the launch of Richard Hewison’s excellent new Kickstarter project, “Memories of Rainbird and Beyond Software“, we are taking the opportunity to preserve and share a fascinating piece of Rainbird history. If you have an interest in Rainbird Software and the people behind it, we highly recommend supporting the project and helping bring it to life.
One of the more intriguing projects from Rainbird’s archives was R.A.I.L. (Rainbird Adventure Implementation Language), a sophisticated text adventure authoring system created by John Jones-Steele. The intention was for R.A.I.L. to be used in-house to create a number of commercial adventures before eventually being released to the public as a complete adventure creation package.
Development began following the 1987 PCW Show and continued for around seven months between November 1987 and June 1988. Jones-Steele was already well known for his work with Abersoft and had recently collaborated with Level 9 on the KAOS adventure system used in Knight Orc and subsequent releases.
R.A.I.L. was an ambitious project, featuring a powerful parser and a highly flexible object system. Objects could possess a wide range of attributes including size, weight, volume and colour, whilst more advanced concepts such as intangible “ghost” objects and visibility across multiple locations were also supported. The system was designed to compete with the likes of Infocom and Level 9 and had the potential to produce some very sophisticated adventures.
Another impressive feature was its ability to heavily compress descriptive text, helping developers maximise available memory. There were also plans to support graphical illustrations and potentially expand the language further with additional libraries and routines after release.
Sadly, despite the promise shown by the system, R.A.I.L. was cancelled during 1988 when the commercial future of text adventures was becoming increasingly uncertain. By that point, graphical adventures were rapidly becoming the dominant force in the genre and there were concerns that a programming-based authoring system would struggle to find a broad audience compared to more menu-driven alternatives.
Thankfully the story does not quite end there. Thanks to the generosity of John Jones-Steele, the unfinished v0.31 development version of R.A.I.L. has survived and was previously made available via the Bird Sanctuary website. With permission, we are now preserving and sharing the package once again, including the interpreter, compiler tools, source files and example adventure materials.
The source code has also been included. However, it should be noted that certain components required to fully build the project are currently missing, believed to be commercial libraries which were not retained with the archive. Even so, there is still a fascinating amount here for anyone interested in adventure game development, programming languages or Rainbird history.
Who knows? Perhaps one day someone may even pick up where development left off and continue the work that John started almost four decades ago.
With huge thanks to Richard Hewison for helping preserve Rainbird’s history, and to John Jones-Steele for allowing R.A.I.L. to be shared and preserved for future generations.
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