>GET LAMP

I am very excited about an upcoming documentary that premiers at PAX East next March.  The film is titled GET LAMP, and it covers the subject of interactive fiction.

In the age of Wii and accelerated graphics cards, it is easy to overlook (or forget, or ignore) a time when computer gaming was done entirely in text, running on machines that boasted 48k of memory (that's kilobytes, folks).  Interactive fiction, or text adventures as they were then called, were a mix of storytelling and puzzle solving.  These games did not use graphics nor joysticks; these were text-only games and required cunning and imagination from its players.  A well written game would draw the player into a world as seamlessly as a well written book, and you – the player – were the protagonist.

I spent many hours playing many of these games, and I was inspired to write my own interaction fiction.  I would stay up late and design puzzles, create stories and draw lots and lots of maps with dreams of one day writing them in BASIC.  I guess the only thing that has changed for me over the years is that I now dream of writing games in Socks.

It will be interesting to hear the development stories of such IF giants as Adams, Blank and Lebling, and Meretzky.  Did their mom tell them to shut off the computer and come to dinner as often as mine did?