Yeandle has stated that the inspiration for The Quill was an article in the August 1980 issue of Practical Computing by Ken Reed in which Reed described the use of a database to produce an adventure game. After Yeandle wrote one database-driven adventure game, Timeline, for Gilsoft, he realised that a database editor was needed, and it was this software which became The Quill. After the original ZX Spectrum version, The Quill was ported to the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit family, and Apple II. Versions were also published by CodeWriter, Inc. in North America and a version by Norace in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. A French version was also made by Codewriter. In 1985 Neil Fleming-Smith ported The Quill to the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers for Gilsoft. Although not credited in the article, Chris Hobson submitted a patch to Crash magazine which allowed the Spectrum version to save to a Microdrive. This was published in the The Quill only allowed for the creation of text-onlyadventures, using a text interpretation process known as a verb-noun parser. Later an add-on called The Illustrator was made to let the user include graphics in the adventures.
Critical reception
The Quill was generally very well received by the computer press at the time of its release. Micro Adventurer described it as "a product to revolutionise the whole microcomputer scene" and rated it "10 out of 10", while Computer and Video Games described it as "worth every penny of the £14.95 price tag", while CRASH said it was "almost ludicrously underpriced for what it does and, more importantly, what it allows others to do." Sinclair User were somewhat initially less enthusiastic, saying "no package, even if it is brilliant in the production of games using the sausage machine technique, will provide an answer to properly machine-coded and original games", although later in 1984 they said "The Quill produces programs on a par with handwritten commercial programs". The Quill was awarded "Best Utility" in the CRASH Readers Awards 1984.
Sequel
Following the success of the original, a second generationQuill was produced with more capabilities and sold under the name Professional Adventure Writer for the ZX Spectrum series computers and CP/M computers. In 2001 WinPAW was written by Douglas Harter. It could read adventures written in Quill and PAW, but ran under MS-Windows and had a few extensions to the original.
