Text adventure documentaries

Anything relating to non Sinclair computers from the 1980's, 90's or even before.
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Firefox

Text adventure documentaries

Post by Firefox »

To help entertain and inform you during these strange days, here are some really excellent documentaries about the whole text adventure (a.k.a. interactive fiction) scene, made by Jason Scott of textfiles.com and archive.org fame. They are pretty much entirely cut-together interviews with the people involved in creating and playing adventures back in the day.

Get Lamp is about the scene in general, from its earliest roots to its fall as a mainstream gaming genre, and how it continues underground by the efforts of dedicated hobbyists.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o15itQ_EhRo[/media]

The Infocom Documentary is obviously about the history of the company Infocom, as told by the wonderful folk who worked there.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXNLWy7rwH4[/media]

If you still haven't had enough, archive.org contains most of the interviews that were used to create these documentaries.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=get+lamp

These have been roughly edited, and sometimes jump backwards ten seconds or so and repeat, plus Jason will randomly start screwing around with the camera's zoom lens at times. But, they do contain even more amazing info!

I haven't watched all of them, but I can really recommend the interviews with ex-Infocom peeps Marc Blanc, Amy Briggs, Jon Palace, and Stu Galley. (I really wish the full Steve Meretzky interview was there...)

Enjoy. :D
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8BitAG
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Re: Text adventure documentaries

Post by 8BitAG »

An interesting film but, like so many gaming documentaries, it's sadly US-centric. Jason decided that he couldn't do the UK scene justice... so a huge chunk of important text adventure history remains uncovered.

The uncut interviews (link above) do feature some people from the UK scene, though.

Richard Bartle
https://archive.org/details/getlamp_bartle

Richard Hewison
https://archive.org/details/getlamp-hewison

Frank Fridd
https://archive.org/details/getlamp-fridd
8-bit Text Adventure Gamer - games - research.
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