Start-up screen of PAW (ZX Spectrum version)

Professional Adventure Writer or PAW (sometimes called PAWS for Professional Adventure Writing System) is program which allows the user to write textual adventure games with graphics. It was written by Tim Gilberts and Graeme Yeandle , based Yeandle's earlier system called The Quill. PAW was published by Gilsoft in 1986 and quickly gained a loyal following. PAW improved over the earlier The Quill in several ways. In particular, its textual input parser was more sophisticated, meaning inputs were no longer confined to the two-word telegraphic verb noun (e.g. "GO WEST; TAKE LAMP") style. PAW also supported NPCs, different character sets, and full use of the memory of the 128K ZX Spectrum.

Later a program called WinPAW was written by Douglas Harter . This program could read adventured written in PAW, but WinPAW ran under Microsoft Windows and had a few extensions compared to the original.

Graeme Yeandle also released an updated version of the CP/M version of PAW for MS-DOS and called it PC Adventure Writer .

External links

• PAW at ODP
• Graeme Yeandle's Text Adventure Page