You wake painfully, from a fitful sleep, to find yourself surrounded by three shadowy figures… After a horrible dizzying moment, the shapes come into focus — vampires, they are vampires, and they are nonchalantly discussing your fate… The swarthy one wants to kill you out of hand. The second argues against. ‘He has tasted blood. He’s one of us now….’
PLAY on the Internet Archive
Release info :
The original Shades of Gray: An Adventure in Black and White, written in AGT was released in 1992, and updated in 1997.
Shades of Gray (referred to by its authors and players as “SOGGY”) was created by seven people living on both sides of the Atlantic, who never met each other, never spoke on the phone, nor even corresponded by email. The entire project was managed from within a private CompuServe Gamer’s Forum. I initiated the project, and had the job of turning the work of seven people: Mark Baker, Steve Bauman, Liz “Belisana” Ellison, Hercules (our Compuserve Sysop), Mike Laskey, Cindy Yans, and me, Judith Pintar, into a single coherent story and game.
SOGGY won the 6th Annual Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) contest in the group category. I credit this game with kickstarting my interest in collaborative programming and authorship (See Projects for my latest ambitions in this regard).
This game is considered by some to be the best AGT game ever written. So, for reasons of history and sentiment I have not ported this game to Inform 7, which means (unfortunately) that you can’t play it in a browser. However, the original game files are available on its IFDB page.
SOGGY was also included in David Gerrold’s book and CD, Fatal Distractions.