HugoJS – Play Hugo games online

HugoJS is an online interpreter for games made with the Hugo interactive fiction authoring system. Source code and instructions on how to install it on your own web site can be found from its GitHub repository.

Hugo was first released by author Kent Tessman in 1995. It was designed largely as a response to the IF system giants of the day, TADS and Inform 6, the latter being the popular IF system that compiled games to Infocom's own Z-machine. Hugo mirrored several of their concepts but added its own bent.

Its manual, The Hugo Book, reads: "Hugo does hope to extend the concepts developed in earlier, similar systems in order to make interactive fiction programming less cryptic, and more flexible and accessible to designers, as well as to add functionality in certain areas where other systems are lacking." Later releases added multimedia support and other improvements.

While Hugo never achieved the popularity of the systems it aimed to replace, the general consensus of the IF community has always been that it is a solid choice for anyone looking to write a game with a smart parser and library. Moreover, some people prefer its blend of coding and world model design to this day (which isn't to say that Inform and TADS haven't had their own permutations over the years).

Those interested in writing their own Hugo games have several online resources at their disposal: