The Ventureweaver

Friends, dreamers, fellow adventurers, I write to you not as a corporation, not as a committee, not as a studio backed by boardrooms and investors, but as one voice, “The Ventureweaver” who has spent decades building what I believe is the last true text adventure. There was once a time when the software world was raw and alive, when creativity was forged in garages and on kitchen tables, when the flicker of a screen could bring entire worlds into being.

In the 1970s, Bill Gates wrote his famous letter against piracy because he saw a future where developers were robbed of their labor. I write
this letter because I see a future where developers are robbed of
their souls. The theft today is not piracy; it is corruption. It is
greed. It is the smothering of imagination beneath the weight of
profit margins, loot boxes, and endless battle passes. And in that
suffocation, something rare, something beautiful, is being lost.
My story begins not in a boardroom, but on the floor of my youth. A
pen. A pad of paper. A mind alive with stories that no one else could
see. I mapped out my first rooms before I ever understood what it
meant to “design a game.” The corridors were crooked, the stairways
impossible, the monsters drawn from imagination. Yet in those
scribbles lay the seed of something real. Then came QBasic. A
language humble and plain, with no promise of glamour, but with a
truth that spoke to me: here, every line of code mattered. Here, the
labyrinth could live. I remember the sound of floppy disks sliding
into drives, the green glow of CRT screens, and the thrill of typing
PRINT “WELCOME TO THE LABYRINTH”. For others, these were relics. For
me, they were the first lanterns lighting a path I would walk for
decades.

From the beginning, I promised myself one thing: this game would be
built with imagination, not compromise. It would not rely on graphics
that age and rot. It would not dangle coins, skins, or patches in
front of players like bait. Instead, it would offer something purer:
eerie rooms filled with silence, strange NPCs whose voices echo
across decades, battles fought not with spectacle, but with words. In
my world, the command EXAMINE means more than a click. TALK is a
conversation that lingers in memory. USE and TAKE are choices that
matter, not mechanics designed to extract money. This is The
Labyrinth of Time’s Edge: a realm of decay and beauty, where
imagination is the only currency that matters. And so the years passed. One line of QBasic at a time. One room after another. One dream stacked atop another dream until the labyrinth became vast enough to swallow me whole. This month, I reached the 3574th room. Each one mapped by hand. Each one born not of a committee, but of a single stubborn belief: that games should still belong to the players, to the adventurers who dare to step inside. At 3574, I find myself in uncharted territory. These rooms are no longer just designs. They are a defiance. Every echo, every NPC, every flicker of lantern light is my declaration that no corporation, no
studio, no soulless boardroom will ever take this away from us.

Look at the industry today. Look at the boardrooms where “games” are
planned out like quarterly earnings reports. Look at the executives
who calculate how many skins, how many loot boxes, how many “content
updates” will bleed the players dry. Look at the obsession with
selling broken titles at full price, patching them later, and then
charging again for downloadable scraps. Is this what games were meant
to become? Hollow products built by committees, marketed by focus
groups, tested by analysts who will never play them? I look at their
empires and I look at my labyrinth. Their games may tower, but they
are hollow. Mine may be fragile, but it is alive. This is why I call this letter my last stand. Bill Gates once wrote of piracy as the threat to his vision. For me, the threat is compromise. It is the erosion of artistry beneath the tidal wave of corporate greed. I will not compromise. I will not chase trends. I will not dilute the labyrinth to fit the appetites of the market. The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge is not a product. It is a stand. This is the last true text adventure — the culmination of thirty years of refusal, thirty years of persistence, thirty years of saying no to the machine.

What is this labyrinth? It is not simply 3574 rooms of description.
It is a world of decay, beauty, and memory. In its halls lie skeleton
warriors whose clattering bones are scarier than any cinematic
cutscene. In its villages lie tattered clotheslines swaying in the
wind, forgotten wells sinking into the earth, NPCs who vanish into
shadow the moment you try to speak. Every room is a story. Every NPC
is a fragment of myth. Every interaction is a reminder that
imagination alone can breathe life into silence. And unlike the games
of corporations, none of this is built to sell. It is built to live.
Thirty years of work. Three decades of scribbles, maps, notes,
mistakes, and revisions. Of rooms drawn by hand, of encounters written in
margins, of QBasic lines typed late into the night. What do I have to
show for it? Not investors. Not millions. Not DLC profits. I have a
labyrinth, a world alive with mystery and decay, a realm that
belongs to anyone who dares to enter. This is my legacy: not a
product, but a world. Not a profit, but a promise.

So I call to you, fellow adventurers: join me. EXAMINE the world.
TALK to its spirits. USE your imagination. TAKE what matters and
leave the rest. Every time you play, every time you share, you prove
that this labyrinth is alive. We are the last defenders of
imagination. We are the ones who will not sell out. And if you step
into this world, if you carry a lantern into its darkness, then you
They are part of the stand. I have reached the 3574th room. The labyrinth grows. The story deepens. And this is only the beginning. This is the last true text adventure. Written in QBasic. Mapped by hand. Carried across decades. Built not for profit, but for love. As long as I live, I will not stop. I will keep mapping. I will keep building. I will keep the flame of text adventures alive. This is not just my project. This is our shared adventure. This is The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge. And I will never sell out.

— The Ventureweaver