At The Verge, Adi Robertson posted Text Adventures: How Twine Remade Gaming, a detailed look at how the world's most accessible game development tool revived the classic text adventure and gave birth to new forms of its own.
Twine — and Twee, the language Klimas wrote to underpin it — wasn't, fundamentally, a new idea. Authors in the 1990s had experimented with digital hypertext fiction, creating multi-threaded novels through websites or programs like Apple's HyperCard. But at the time, Klimas wasn't familiar with hypertext. His software also had two big advantages: it could be used with very little practice, and to play the resulting games, all you needed was a web browser.
The article also suggests that Twine's star is fading somewhat because it is (and perhaps always was) more limiting than it could be yet more complex than it should be. Or perhaps the community (and cultural capital) that arose around it has simply dispersed.
