Summary The Gas Research Inst.'s (GRI's) Tight Gas Sands Program has been involved with research on low-permeability formations during the past 4 years. The main focus of the research has been to improve the general understanding of producing tight reservoirs, while a specific focus has been to advance the technology involving hydraulic-fracture geometry. The unique aspect of this research is that the laboratories have been actual gas wells completed in the Travis Peak formation in east Texas. To extend the development of technology fully, GRI has planned four staged field experiments (SFE's) from 1986 through 1989. The SFE program provides the opportunity to collect a wealth of data that cannot be obtained from normal cooperative research wells. The purpose of this paper is to summarize all the tests and data collected on the first SFE and to present the available results from the analyses of these data.