The Quill: Adventure Writing System

The Quill is a program to write home computer adventure games. Written by Graeme Yeandle, it was originally published on the ZX Spectrum by Gilsoft in December 1983. Although available to the general public, it was used by several games companies to create best-selling titles; over 450 commercially published titles for the ZX Spectrum were written using The Quill.

After the original ZX Spectrum version, The Quill was ported to the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit family, ORIC, and Apple II. Versions were also published by CodeWriter, Inc. in North America (under the name of AdventureWriter) 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 September 1986 edition.