Lies was originally finished in May, 1992 for a class that I was taking at MIT called "Interactive and Non-linear Fiction" (the course description, despite my total ignorance of the fact, was a play on the fact that MIT takes itself way too seriously...) The professor, Dr. Janet Murray, told us it was the first class ever of its sort. It was a strange mix of people from the entire spectrum of life at MIT from people who have practically no business being there (me) to people who were ready to write their own "story-spaces" in Scheme or C++. It was fun.
Lies was originally done in HyperCard 2.0 on a Mac. It has been (painfully) adapted for the Web. I am sure there was a less manual way to do it, unfortunately, I did not bump into it.
My ideas about HyperFiction:
I like HyperFiction that puts form before function, despite the lure of the technology. I hate scroll bars, because they
are intrusive to my reading experience. I need to state very clearly that I am
not completely satisfied with Lies, and that I see more potential than real
substance, but that is a disclaimer, and belongs someplace else. HyperFiction
provides an excellent means of expressing stories that have many levels, plots
within plots, motives within motives, and I think writers are just beginning to
figure out how to plumb those types of depths.
In HyperFiction speak, Lies is a fixed-content, single point of view story. The Hyper-ness comes from the fact that I give you choices. Your choices only affect your perception, not the content, of the story. Note that the use of pronouns lets me re-use nodes, the re-definition of words gives me a device that I have probably abused, and that my flimsy use of dreams vs. reality in one of the endings bothers me more than it could bother you.
Lies in Chinese. Thanks to Shuen-shing Lee and his team of translators.
Prentiss Riddle's Hyperfiction Homepage classifies Lies as "Honest-to-gosh Hyperfiction", and he has some other nice things to say.
Listed in Hyperizons which is another collection of hypertext on the web.
Listed in A Comprehensive Links Catalog maintained by the Compact for Responsive Electronic Writing (CREW)
An Interview I did with some other hypertext authors...