Malinche Entertainment is an interactive fiction

Interactive fiction

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...

 development and publishing business founded by Howard Sherman. The company was founded in 2002. Malinche Entertainment claims to be working in the tradition of early interactive fiction developer Infocom

Infocom

Infocom was a software company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a relational database called Cornerstone....

. Sherman claims to have sold 150,000 copies of his games as of May 2006. He claims the business is profitable. Malinche Entertainment is notable for being one of the last commercial publishers of interactive fiction.

Malinche Entertainment's published games include Pentari: First Light (March 2003, fantasy), Greystone (2003, murder mystery set in an asylum), Endgame (2004, suspense), The First Mile (2005, horror), and Pentari: The Apprentice (2007, fantasy). All of Malinche Entertainment's games are written by Sherman. They are written using Inform

Inform

Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7 , a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.- Z-Machine and...

 targeting the virtual Z-machine

Z-machine

The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions , and could therefore port all its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a...

. Versions of some games are also available for iPod

IPod

iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...

s, using a hypertext

Hypertext

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...

 interface. The games have also been ported to the Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS

The is a portable game console produced by Nintendo, first released on November 21, 2004. A distinctive feature of the system is the presence of two separate LCD screens, the lower of which is a touchscreen, encompassed within a clamshell design, similar to the Game Boy Advance SP...

.

Sherman previously worked at RMI.net, then Excalibur Internet Corp.. He left Excalibur in 2003 to work for his own consulting firm and Malinche.

Malinche markets to adventure gamers, the general fiction book market, and blind gamers.

Controversy

Sherman has threatened to sue the web publication SPAG for considering to publish an unfavorable review of one of his games. The Malinche website has displayed carefully edited review quotes for games, in order to alter the reviewers' intended meaning ("...mystery story lovers should find the quest for the murderer addictive enough to overcome its weaknesses. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t recommend it for the more wide-ranging hard-core interactive fiction player." was reduced to simply "...Mystery story lovers should find the quest for the murderer addictive..."), and quotations from reviews written decades ago for games by Infocom were presented so as to imply that they described Malinche games.

He also calls himself "the only active Implementor of Interactive Fiction in the world", despite the existence of a thriving hobbyist community and his own acknowledgement of hobbyist-produced games. In fact, Sherman himself was taking part in that community in the very same year that Malinche Entertainment was founded, when he entered a game called "BOFH" (based on Simon Travaglia

Simon Travaglia

Simon Travaglia is best known as the author of the Bastard Operator From Hell stories, about a rogue system administrator. He lives in Hautapu , New Zealand with his three cows, dog, cat and Massey Ferguson MF135...

's Bastard Operator From Hell

Bastard Operator From Hell

The Bastard Operator From Hell , a fictional character created by Simon Travaglia, is a rogue system administrator who takes out his anger on users , colleagues, bosses, and anyone else who gets in his way....

 property) into the 8th annual Interactive Fiction Competition

Interactive Fiction Competition

The Interactive Fiction Competition is one of the best known of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it...

.

Sherman also refers to Malinche as "The World's Only Publisher of Interactive Fiction", despite the existence of at least one other commercial publisher of interactive fiction.

External links

• Malinche Entertainment - Official site
• Sherman, Howard A. - At Baf's Guide. Provides details and downloads of freely available games by Sherman.
• Interviews
  • Just Adventure Interview with Howard Sherman - Malinche Entertainment
  • Howard Sherman - Interview at Adventure Classic Gaming
  • Interview with Howard Sherman at Absolute Write
  • In Depth : Malinche Entertainment Interview at MorphZone