This site and all the games on it are the work of me, Robin Johnson, an easily-bored nerd from Edinburgh. I wrote a text-adventure engine in Javascript and a proof-of-concept game for it, Hamlet, in late 2003, for fun and to see if it was possible. I now plan to carry on developing the engine and writing new games for it, because it's fun and possible.

I first called the engine 'Nondescript' because the game data was written in a kind of nondeterministic script, but later decided that versificator was a cooler name. The word comes from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which it is the name of a mechanical device, apparently a cross between a printing-press and a giant kaleidoscope, that writes books automatically. It's also an old word for a bad poet, but never mind about that.

The engine is known to work with Internet Explorer 5+, and Firefox 1.0+.

The technology on this site is mine, but free. The art is free, but mine.

That is to say, the Versificator engine - the file called versif03.js (or some other version number) - is my copyright but completely free software - you may copy, modify, and distribute it for no profit (though I request that you mark your own modifications with script comments.) The games, though, I'm more guarded about - they cost nothing, and you may copy and distribute their files (typically all the other .js and .html files in a game directory) for no profit, as much as you like, but you may not distribute them with any changes - they're my art, and personal to me.

Please do not email me asking permission to rewrite the games for other systems. If you're going to go to all that effort, you might as well make your own game.

Please do email me with comments and suggestions about the games - I like that!

Finally, if you really like this site, I have a Paypal account for the email address below. A pint of beer in my local costs £2.45 Sterling. Cheers!

My email address is: