* or Fall Fooferal, for our Southern Hemisphere Friends
The games and original sites for each prior Spring Thing can be browsed here.
The IF Wiki also maintains a page on Spring Thing, and the IFDB Spring Thing tag catalogues most of the games that have been entered over the years. The games are also preserved at the Interactive Fiction Archive.
Spring Thing was first announced by Adam Cadre in 2001. The first competition took place in spring 2002. Cadre ran the competition for two years.
After a year of inactivity in 2004, Greg Boettcher revived the competition and organized it from 2005 to 2013, during which time it became a regular mainstay in the parser IF community.
Aaron A. Reed took over managing the competition in 2014, during a period where communities making non-parser games began to discover the Thing. For the 2015 season, he re-branded it as a “festival.”
IF Author Brian Rushton (MathBrush) wrote a year-by-year history of Spring Thing from its inception through 2017.
Starting with the 2015 season, the Spring Thing was redesigned to make it a space where people working on all kinds of text games can come together to celebrate making, releasing, and playing new stuff.
Formerly a “competition” for interactive fiction, the rebranding as a festival indicates a focus on showcasing and promoting new games in a friendly, less competitive environment.
What changed from the old Thing?
No entry fee, although authors must still submit an intent to enter in advance.
No numerical ranking of entered games. Instead, Main Festival games can be nominated for ribbons, state fair style.
“Back Garden” games don't participate in voting and prizes, but have looser restrictions on entry, giving authors an alternative to the Main Festival.
Non-cash prizes go into a general pool that any entrant has a chance to win, and cash prizes are no longer awarded.
What remained the same? The Thing is still for new, finished, and freely available works of interactive fiction. Longer games are still welcomed, but not required. Authors must still submit an intent to enter in advance, and the festival will still be open for long enough to give people time to play and review the games.