Going out into the world...
...that's what your parents wanted you to do when they signed you up with the Junior Hikers. Despite their urgings, you don't want to go. With your shy interior and uninspiring exterior, you just know you won't measure up. But soon you'll find that another world is going to claim you first, a world right there on your desk, less than 12 inches in diameter....
Originally entered in the 2nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in 1996, Small World won 4th Place in that contest, and went on to win Best Setting and Best Individual Non-Player Character in the XYZZY Awards for Best IF of that year.
How to Get Small
The latest version of Small World is release 3, which can be downloaded from this site or from the IF Archive. If gibberish appears on your screen, please wait till it's finished loading and save the result as a "source file".
Small World is a game written in TADS. If you are not already familiar with how to play text adventure games, see this tutorial on downloading and running text adventures, from BrassLantern.org. You will need a TADS interpreter to run Small World, and the tutorial will explain how to get the correct interpreter for your system, if available.
Alternately, if you are on a Macintosh computer, you can download an all-in-one Macintosh application, where the interpreter and the game file have been "bound" together. The application icon was provided by Andrew Plotkin. This should be easier for people who've never played text adventure games before. However, this application requires Classic to run on Mac OS X.
A Small Map
Active development on Small World ceased in 1998, but there is a chance I will be releasing a new version of Small World with a special world map using TADSMap.