Ad: Manage updates with the Download App

infocom

'Get Lamp' illuminates the text adventure game

Jason Scott's first documentary in 2005 was about bulletin board systems (BBSs), which were in a sense the PC world's parallel evolution of the early Internet. This documentary, really more a multi-disc series of interviews with BBS pioneers than a documentary film as such, brought back to me my early years in personal computing and my subsequent forays into shareware software development through the mid-1990s.

Now, Scott has tackled a subject from roughly the same era: the text adventure game. My involvement here was more peripheral but no less a part of my memories.

As his new "… Read more

'Pac-Man,' meet 'Zork'

"You have been attacked by a cyan ghost! You pass out and awake minutes later back where you began."

You might not remember it this way, but you--and probably everyone you know--has almost certainly had this experience, though in a different manifestation.

It's Pac-Man. Except instead of controlling your little yellow iconic character around a maze of dots and colored ghosts, this is Pac-Txt, a text version of the famous video game that recalls the old glory days of Infocom games like Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

I found the site after stopping in on one … Read more