Text Adventure Documentary Film

When I was a kid, I played just about every com­put­er text adven­ture game I could get my hands on. I did try to play one of those graph­i­cal D&D games, but it nev­er seemed to run very well on my VTech Laser128 (an Apple II clone). How­ev­er, the text adven­ture games seemed to have so much more wit to them. I think it was very much a result of the games’ authors being required to focus on sto­ry and find cre­ative respons­es to all the crazy sorts of input that play­ers would be sure to enter. I mean, did­n’t we all instruct our brave adven­tur­er to “pick nose” at some point?

So, I was real­ly excit­ed to see the trail­er for Get Lamp, a doc­u­men­tary film about the text adven­ture game. Check it out. Of course, this is about as Indy as inde­pen­dent films get and the film mak­er isn’t too sure when he’s going to release it — you’ll just have to sign up for the e‑mail list.

And if you’ve nev­er played a game like this, or just for­got how fun they were, then why don’t you go play Zork for a while? Don’t for­get your trusty map:

Hand drawn map of Zork I

…and if you’ve got a more recent ver­sion of OS X installed (like me), then you can no longer play the copy of Zork you down­loaded from Info­com’s web­site. You can still install the Zork engine and play via the Ter­mi­nal. How­ev­er, if you’re too lazy to do that (also like me), you can still play a web-based ver­sion at iFic­tion.

You are standing in an open field...

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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