Lavonardo

In an unexpected bout of entertainment software archaeology Jason Scott has unearthed the sales figures for Infocom.

Zork I and Hitchhiker’s Guide are the top sellers. Even if half a decade has passed from their release.

The 14th annual interactive fiction competition has now officially started.

I still haven’t finished last year’s winner, but definitely aim to sample a few of the 30+ games offered.

This week’s Macro Day challenge is logo.

I’ve used Apple’s logo in the past rounds (though in different challenges), so figured it’s time to try out something new. The selection fell on the long-gone Infocom, whose rounded-out logo is instantly recognizable.

Frotz is now available in the App Store. Not yet enough to push towards purchasing an iPhone. But definitely an additional attraction factor for iPod Touch. Which is good, since the nano’s center button started to act up today.

Yet another Z-machine interpreter has surfaced: Parchment uses the web browser for rendering the game, and is thus as platform-neutral as they come. Apart from being dependent on browser features, obviously.

Been a while since I last advertised new things that got dropped into the “read often”-pile:

• Roger Ebert’s movie blog.
• Planet IF - a very convenient aggregator for interactive fiction related blogs (and news sites).
• Next Big Future - things that shape the next decades, if not centuries. Mainly technology-oriented.
• Still haven’t got an “internet tablet, but if I was planning to, the Tabletblog would certainly be religiously read. Now, it’s just merely interesting.
• Somehow, I’d dropped Fimoculous. Easily rectified.

By far the biggest news in recent times in the interactive fiction community is Andy Baio’s uncovering of the unpublished sequel to the 1984 game published by Infocom.

That’s right. A whole unpublished game. Or actually just a duo of prototypes with very limited functionality.

But it’s not really the game (playable on the page with an embedded Z-machine interpreter) that’s the highlight of the show, but the story of the game - told both in the blog entry, and the long string of comments to it.

The comments are worthwhile indeed, as the writers include several Infocom implementors (and also quite a bit of extended flaming). The game spent a long time in pre-production, including a stint when it was to be co-developed by their worst rivals, Magnetic Scrolls. But in the end it did not really go far, as Infocom was scuttled by Activision’s closing of the Cambridge office in 1989.

The game design is also featured on the page, detailed to a level on which a programmer could easily take the basic plot and whip it to a shape in a couple of evenings. Obviously, filling out the details and otherwise productizing the game would consume a whole lot more. And there would be the nasty issue of copyrights to consider…

Interactive fiction - that is: games that use pure text for input and output - seems not to be the topic of a snazzy movie.

But against all odds, GET LAMP, a documentary film on the very subject looks to be very interesting indeed. Jason Scott, the director, has previously put together a well-received documentary film on the bulletin board systems communities.

The recently released trailer for GET LAMP is not exactly action-packed, but a neat dissection of the first ever internet community I actually participated, back in the early nineties, when USENET was king of the hill.

I missed the release of the Zork Trilogy in a single package back in the late eighties. The games have been in the collection for ages, but only as single entries.

The main attraction of the collection is an actual zorkmid coin minted for this release and this release alone. The presence of the coin is the reason why complete in box instances of this product pull in hefty bids on eBay.

The trilogy is obviously sold out long ago, and the coins thus limited in number.

Sadly the effort to reproduce the coins in mass quantities ground to a halt earlier. Though the idea of interest in geocoins having lowered the barrier of entry seems interesting.

More targets for the insatiably curious amongst the readers:

• Internet Explorer’s not yet exactly reeling from the blows from superior browsers, so a few needles into a convenient voodoo doll would be appreciated.
• A group blog by science fiction authors has tens of authors, but not much content yet. It features Charles Stross and Jeff VanderMeer, so it bears keeping an eye out for.
• The Foja mountains in Papua yielded new discovered critters once again, this time a really big rat.

Yet another blog devoted on publicizing worthy advertisements cannot hurt.

• According to the Forbes Fictional Fifteen, Scrooge McDuck is the richest individual. Too bad the image used of the bird in question is of very low quality. Simpsons’ Mr. Burns clocks in at #6, and Lucius Malfoy at #14. On the company side, it’s extremely pleasing to see Infocom’s Frobozz Magic Company featured - especially after a decades long dry spell of new games set in the Empire.
• A long bet is settled, with blogs ranked higher than New York Times in search results in the top stories of the year.
• Practice safe surfing: use two browsers.

What? Me, out of touch?

Surely missing the start of the annual interactive fiction competition by almost a week is a sure sign thereof.

Out of the two dozen or so games some are bound to be good, some frightfully bad, and most mediocre. Ought to try out a few, just for kicks.

Here we go again. It’s so hard to hold back the stream of links.

• M.C. Escher’s Relativity as interpreted in Lego.
• Gamasutra interviews Textfyre’s David Cornelson.
• Airport horror stories, part n: overstepping the bounds of authority.
• Why, of why there are so few comics in finnish bookstores?
  Monopoly of taste (or lack thereof).
• Beatdowns throughout history.
• How to characterize bottled water (with a selection of nifty symbols thrown in for good measure).
• The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit was not held in conjunction to the Ottawa Linux Symposium.
• Top 100 images from Hubble Space Telescope.
• Fake car sunroof. Presumably for people with fake cars.

Greg Costikyan, an all-round game designer (and founder of Manifesto Games) has kicked off a website that provides a daily review of a non-mainstream game.

Thus far the selection has been interesting. Ranging from the truly obscure (Skotos’ Lovecraft Country) to something that half of the magazines reviewed (Defcon).

And from a casual glimpse on the site learned two things:
a) there’s a Mac version of Defcon available,
b) interactive fiction and puns mix very well indeed.

iPhone runs doom, that’s been established.

A lot more retrogaming props are to be give for Frotz, a z-machine implementation.

The omission of the latter on the ubiquitous S60 continues to puzzle. The availability of full keyboards (eg. E70) and adaptive text input would be a boon for adventurers caught in the rush hour municipal traffic.

(Yes. Obviously I ought to quit bitching and port an interpreter, but the threshold to become prolific on the smartphone platform remains high, even after the addition of a standard C library. Maybe after I pick up an Intel-based laptop, since the S60 SDK seems to be Mac-hostile.)

Missed the blog day on august 31st, but recommendations for interesting blogs are welcome any day…

• Kalajuttu is the first finnish fishkeeping-blog I’ve run across. And a good reminder that I ought to pull mine out of hibernation.
• Sentient Developments is a collection of interesting articles on science, singularity and other topics that skirt around transhumanism.
• Kolikon Kääntöpuoli: there’s never enough said about games, comics and life in general - especially when accompanied with a decent amount of attitude.
• Emily Short writes pretty much the only blog about interactive fiction.
• Gamepolitics, because the two keep crossing each other frequently (and not only when herded by Jack Thompson).

Dennis Jerz has put together an amazing two-headed article on the original piece of interactive fiction: the (Colossal Cave) Adventure.

The article covers both the cave system in Kentucky the game is loosely based on, as well as the original source code of the program. The photographs from the caverns (and their captions) wallow in adventure gaming lore, and the fortran code is downright frightening to read.

But the article itself certainly is not. It’s the best piece of gaming archeology I have seen in ages.

In the long series on “playing interactive fiction with weird means”: instant messaging.

Recent arrivals.

• Game business from a finnish perspective.
• Geeks of Doom.
• Yet another finnish mobile communications blog (updated impressively often).
• Yet another finnish mobile communications blog (this one updated less regularly).
• Textfyre has a blog (but no published games yet).
• Finnish metal news-blog.
• Eliminating creationism from the science aisle, one bookstore at a time.
• Inspired rants, very inspired indeed. And very finnish.

Matt Barton is at it again. Following the successful trilogy of computerized RPG history, he’s moved on to interactive fiction.

The history of Zork in Gamasutra is supplemented with a much wider selection of interviews in Armchair Arcade.

Interesting. Apart from Howard Sherman of Malinche Software, who comes off as a self-important whiner so full of himself he’s about to pop. And whose claims of being the “sole remaining implementor” are hollow anyway, as commercial releases of games such as City of Secrets (freely available now) and 1893 testify.