Spring Thing was first announced by Adam Cadre in 2001. The first competition took place in Spring 2002. To describe the purpose of the competition, Cadre said:

"Every fall, the interactive fiction community holds a competition [the IF Comp] designed to showcase short works (taking two hours or less to play.) The first of these, in 1995, featured twelve games, and as the ifcomp site will attest, 'The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.'

"The 2001 comp featured 52 games, many of them half-baked at best; discussion was limited, with a brief flurry of reviews and then not much conversation about the games, possibly because most judges only had time to play a small fraction of them. Furthermore, relatively few IF works of substance were released at other times of the year, which was not an aberration but a trend dating almost to the beginning of the comp. What to do? I figured the Spring Thing might help some."

Cadre ran the competition for two years—2002 and 2003—after which he stopped, due to a lack of a lack of time for IF-related stuff.

Concerning the 2002 and 2003 Spring Thing competitions, see also Adam Cadre's web site.

After a year of inactivity in 2004, Greg Boettcher revived the Spring Thing and organized it from 2005 to 2013. Aaron Reed took over managing the competition in 2014.