GoogleTechTalks
Google Tech Talk (more below)
March 7, 2011
Presented by Jason Scott.
ABSTRACT
Jason Scott will talk about making the documentary and we’ll be screening some portion of the film.
In the early years of the microcomputer, a special kind of game was being played. With limited sound, simple graphics, and tiny amounts of computing power, the first games on home computers would hardly raise an eyebrow in the modern era of photorealism and surround sound. In a world of Quake, Half-Life and Halo, it is expected that a successful game must be loud, fast, and full of blazing life-like action.
But in the early 1980s, an entire industry rose over the telling of tales, the solving of intricate puzzles and the art of writing. Like living books, these games described fantastic worlds to their readers, and then invited them to live within them.
They were called “computer adventure games”, and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind.
Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new set of places to explore.
Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them.
Speaker Info:
Jason Scott ( http://www.getlamp.com/director.html )
Jason Scott is a digital historian and archivist who specializes in early microcomputer history and dial-up bulletin board systems. He is the webmaster of textfiles.com, a collection of BBS-era textfiles that has been open to the public since 1998. In 2001, he began filming a documentary about BBSes called “BBS: The Documentary”, an 8-episode mini-series about BBSes spanning 25 years and totalling five and a half hours in length. This documentary series was released on 3 DVDs in early 2005. He has been playing text adventures since he was 10, and to this day does not understand why the rod scares the bird.
Source
Greedy Gulch was the first text adventure I played, but went on to play Colossal later on. Mountains of Kett later on and then of course on to Zork & Infocom…
17:25 dubbed ???
FUCK google
"Em…get troll."
Kind of funny that since this was shown first an interactive fiction game was successfully funded (and over funded at that) on kickstarter and did well financially.
I still have Zork I, II & 3 on an official Infocom CD release beside my desk still.
Straight up, this is one of highest quality thought provoking, enticing documentaries I have ever seen. It makes you think, and that is a good thing. TY all that interviewed, the producer/director, etc and of course historically to those no longer with us and unwilling to participate. Its perfect, well done!
Just today I released my interactive fiction collection app Gamebook. taplink.cc/questgamebook
I think IF has huge potential and big future. Just as books never went out of market, IF never will too if we keep it interesting.
IF is not a mass market product, like it was once. It was a mass market for computer users when the audience of computer users was rather different, dare I say more intellectual.
Bröther, get lämp
Text is grafic, if not pictorial.
This is a great video.
Interactive fiction isn't dead though, and im not talking about visual novels.
There's this type of IF, that's sort of a combination of text adventures and webcomics. The author writes and draws a story in chunks at a time, and in between these chunks, the readers give 'commands' for what the characters should do next. The author then uses these commands in the next chunk, and the readers see what effect their actions have.
This type of IF is usually called "quests" or "forum adventures"(because they're usually run on a forum) and they're quite enjoyable to follow.
Interactive Fiction hasn't truly gone out in my opinion, look at VNs and dating sims for example. They all ask for a hell of a lot of reading.
i mean if they were so inclined they could put out commercial products on digital distribution platforms like itch dot io, Steam & etc. and judge for themselves & see if it's worth it or not. On another note, i enjoyed watching the documentary, it was fun learning about the beginning of text adventure games.
While pure, only words, text based interactive fiction (IF) is so niche it's basically a zombie nowadays, there is a very slight variant that is alive and well. Visual Novels are that variant that is alive and well, and they are text adventures with very basic still pictures to go along with the text. If you are interested in IF, maybe think about adding pictures to help the narrative along. And your dead forgotten games can breath again.
And offer the text only based version alongside the Visual Novel for the gamer on the go. Same exact game, with or without pictures, as the user chooses.
I called Dave Lebling about 6 years ago or so and said thank you. Very nice guy
I've been writing IF for over a decade so far, I wasn't even aware there were communities to share the works around with. I just harassed my friends to play them all…
Great documentary, thanks to the creator. My only disappointment was no Graham Nelson! 🙂 But so brilliant to see all the heroes of my youth talking about their passion.
Really enjoyed watching not only the documentary but the Q&A after. Just recently had a friend tell me about Inform and recommended I watch this to get some inspiration, and it fucking worked. Thanks for this tech talk.
John Romero looks so young
Is the cave adventure still downloadable?
18:07, 22:50, 43:23, 44:51 Audience laughs.
My absolute favorite moment is 44:51. That is awesome.
For those interested, it is now late 2017 and Amazon Echo devices have several “skills” (downloadable apps) that are basically text adventures, where the speaker speaks all the descriptions and takes commands spoken from you (like “North”). They are really fun!
Jesus I thought I was a dork
Movie starts at 7:50 if you want to skip the talk at the beginning
New gen needs this badly. Their instant gratification needs are ruining the gaming industry. Games today costs 80+ and no they're just mediocre at best except new gen gets off on it.
If you love the old school text adventure style games, take a look at my new single player mud, now in beta,
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1404476165/darkgon-a-single-player-text-adventure-mud-like-ga