A couple times a month I ride the NJ Transit train from New York (where I study) to Philadelphia (my parent's home). I will stay for a weekend (Friday afternoon to Sunday morning) and then head back to school for the coming week. Door to door the trip takes around 4 hours. Round-trip is 8 hours. The time I spend at home is normally 36 hours. If you do the math, you see that I love my parents dearly (I don't know too many other people I would make this sacrifice for.) I am currently in the middle of a longer piece of interactive fiction. I was browsing through the newsgroups when I saw an announcement for the Art Comp. The rules stated that the comp was a great opportunity for writers whose games were taking a long time to write (like mine) and for newbie writers (like me). I saw the opportunity and decided to run with it. My first idea was very ambitious, and I found myself with a project that would take longer than the two weeks I had budgeted for it. I was feeling pretty helpless, riding the train back to NY, when I was hit by inspiration. Why not write a game that simulated a train ride? My immediate inspirations for the game were built by just looking around the compartment and remembering my own personal experiences. I decided on a later ride (when I was on the train at 12:30 at night) to set the game as the Last Ride of the Night. You now have the results of that experiment. My immediate problem was the lack of a plot. I understood that the competition didn't require (or necessarily want) an elaborate plot, but I still needed something to drive the game forward. I could have done more, but the train is filled with different objects and things you can do with them. And with the game only having 60 turns (the length of time before the train reaches its destination) one can play multiple times and find something new. Plus, with 6 different endings, exploring the game is the only way to figure out everything that is in there. I would like to thank my betatesters; Daphne, Allison, Cirk Bejnar, and Hypernaut. They helped me build a game that would be very sparse (and poorly implemented) without them. I owe any success of this game to them. I would also like to thank my close friend Benji Walters, whom I was able to always bounce ideas off of. His conversations with me enriched the game. Thank you for playing my game, and hopefully with the experience I garnered writing this one, my other (future) games will only be enhanced. Mordechai Shinefield