I’ve been getting photos and contributions from people either inspired by GET LAMP or figuring I’d want to see something related to text adventures they have in their possession. I appreciate this very, very much. This falls into the latter camp.
Todd Gaines tells me that he and a friend did this in 1983, making one for each of them and utilizing actual stained glass. This is an actual stained glass window!
This is an example of the kind of inspiration text adventures brought out that I was worried might have been forgotten. Great job, Todd!
So, while you’re waiting for your copy of GET LAMP to arrive (or, as I’ve been told by some, waiting for the copies to start shipping before ordering), may I bring your attention to one of the many helpful introductions to modern Interactive Fiction that are popping up in the world.
It’s called The Gameshelf, a video podcast where you are given a solid introduction to a game or style of game. #8 has just arrived and it’s all IF, all the time.
It’s in high definition, has awesome production values, and really does a solid job of introducing people to the greatness, the problems, and most importantly, the solutions to dealing with interactive fiction. It also dumps into your lap a whole range of games to try out, including ways to try them out immediately. The main GET LAMP site will hopefully follow in the footsteps of this excellent work. (Actually, two interviewees from GET LAMP, Nick Montfort and Andrew Plotkin, appear in this episode as well.)
So a few people, over the past months, have asked or commented about the guy in the inner artwork spread:
Some of it’s about the hair, or that he’s strongly built (unusual for a computer geek) and so on. Others, of course, have just assumed he’s “a guy” and nothing else.
When I was working with Lukas Ketner to do the artwork that became the inner spread, I gave him a ton of suggestions, requests, and reference photos. Some he used and some he didn’t, and over a short period of time we had a very nice artwork indeed. One of the reference photos was “the guy”:
This is in fact Marc Pacilli, my cousin.
It is rather a painful thing for my family, even over twenty years later – Marc was killed from a fall while on a scouting trip, in 1988. He was, especially with the passage of time, very young – still in his teens.
Marc was the one who really introduced me to adventure games. I found an adventure game on the mainframe terminals at work when I visited my father at IBM’s research center, but the IBM PC in my aunt and uncle’s home had Microsoft Adventure, and it was there we got to experience this game properly – not in a solitary fashion in some cold research facility, but surrounding the computer in the den, trying to figure out what Woods and Crowther had planned, sketching out maps, going crazy trying to know where we were in mazes.
Marc solved a lot of it, including the endgame. Marc was, and this is not some warm nostalgic hindsight, goddamn smart. Marc could have been anything he wanted to – an athlete, a computer guy, a musician. He was good at stuff, and was one of the most balanced people I’ve ever known. Had he been running some company in later years, I’m sure he would have been able to go out and kick everyone’s ass in the company’s basketball court or during a pickup game of football in the park, and then go back and nail what was slowing up the code builds. He was just that kind of guy. It’s why the artwork shows a muscular guy working at a computer – that was Marc.
So when working on the artwork design, I knew that there would be a guy working at a computer – and that guy could be anybody. So why not Marc?
I’m sorry that when you search for his name, you don’t get any hits – if he’d been around in the 90s, you can be sure we’d both have been in contact talking about httpd and getting it working and designing web pages and the whole deal. You’d have had hundreds of hits for his name, I just know this. But this weblog entry will be one of the only ones, and that sucks. The whole thing sucks, actually – but it wasn’t incompetence or evil or disease or any of a hundred things that took him from our family and the world. It was just plain stupid chance, a freak accident, an unwanted set of circumstances. I remember the hole it left, a terrible blankness, that never got filled, by any of us who knew him.
In a few weeks, hundreds of people will have Marc’s image in their homes and work – it will eventually be thousands, all over the world. An image of Marc sorting out a problem, or maybe discovering a link, with a whole range of possibilities and ideas and dreams around him.
It’s maybe not much at all, but it will have to do.
I recorded 120 hours of interview footage from 85 interviews conducted over a few years. From those hours, I cut things down to about 30-40 hours of clips. From those 30-40 hours of clips, I ended up with 4-5 in the rough mix of things, and now it’s getting to be an amount smaller than that. People who made or are interested in text adventures have a few shared traits, one of which is they are brilliantly well-spoken.
Therefore, my cut-aside and ultimately left-aside clips are sometimes really cool on their own. Where I can, I’ve made them bonus features, especially when I’ve edited a large sequence only to find it doesn’t fit anywhere in the branches.
Ultimately, of course, the full interviews will be uploaded, but that’s a lot for people to go through, although I think a lot of the interviews are fascinating on their own.
For those who are quite content not to watch video of the PAX East Panel, or who can’t, here’s an mp3 of the entire panel (64mb, stereo):
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While you’re waiting DVD release, and before I take it and smooth it over with a couple second camera sources I have been given, I wanted to share the PAX East Panel that occurred after the screening. I know a lot of people wanted to see this, and the room got so packed a few people who wanted to see the panel got turned away, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to properly see it. So here’s a “rough cut” of the panel, split into two pieces because of a size limit on Vimeo.
Panelists, left to right: Dave Lebling, Don Woods, Brian Moriarty, Andrew Plotkin, Nick Montfort, Steve Meretzky, Jason Scott. It’s about 1 hour and 8 minutes.
I was holding back on the surprise guest, but it already leaked out, and what the heck, people should have all the facts before they show.
The GET LAMP panel will take place right after the screening of GET LAMP’s PAX mix, in the same theater. By my estimate it’ll convene somewhere in the range of 11pm and go on for a tad.
Mike Dornbrook, who was one of my favorite interviewees for GET LAMP, was recently profiled on the website for one of the products made by his company, Harmonix. Called “Mike Dornbrook’s Desk”, it shows how great his office is, and how much respect he affords his days with Infocom.
Click on the image of his office to read further. It’s well worth it, and not that long.
Along with finishing up editing, designing menus, planning out bonus features, and all the rest, I also have been working on the packaging for GET LAMP, which I want to be as enjoyable and true to the subject matter as possible. I am following the same template I enjoyed with the BBS Documentary, that is, a somewhat simple outside slipcover with a complicated and interesting inside multiple DVD tray. GET LAMP has two DVDs to BBS Documentary’s three, but the look is the same. (If you go over to the BBS Documentary order page, you can see what I’m talking about).
This time, I knew I wanted the back three-panel space to have one big piece of artwork on it. I wasn’t exactly sure how that was going to be accomplished, and I didn’t let indecision hold up other aspects of production, but it was somewhere there in the back of my mind.
Then I saw this weblog entry from a software house called Panic, who had decided (for fun) to come up with a fictional alternate history of the company extending a couple decades back, and one in which they had a financially-unsound decision to go into the Atari 2600 game business. They had realistically-weathered artifacts, a fake magazine ad, and some absolutely amazing cover art. Even though the company didn’t exist back then, the artwork captured the look of the old cartridge cover art perfectly.
I knew I’d found my artist.
His name is Lukas Ketner, he’s a Portland-based freelance illustrator, and together, through rounds of revisions and designs, we’ve come up with the artwork that will grace the inside of GET LAMP’s packaging.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce the GET LAMP poster:
This will be the first thing you see when you open up the package, and I think it makes just the right impression about what’s waiting for you.
Lukas was an absolute joy to work with, and I recommend him for art projects you’re seeking to do – he was on time, on budget, and listened every step of the way. His website has many more examples of his artwork and styles – he doesn’t just do retro 1980s box art!
So, I am so bowled over about this artwork, I am considering making it available as a poster for sale. This would be a high-quality print on really good paper. I’m researching this now, but I’d like to reach out and ask if you want to be notified if such a poster becomes available, and at what price.
If you’re interested, please mail me at poster@getlamp.com and I will do a one-time mailing when final details about the poster’s availability and price are solid.
Dr. Nick Montfort, who figures prominently in GET LAMP and who I’ve mentioned several times in this weblog, has put out an unusually detailed travelogue in trying to find the origins of Zork. Not the game, mind you – he wrote extensively about that in his book Twisty Little Passages. No, in this case he’s trying to track back the specific word Zork, which was bouncing around MIT at the time the game was being written and which hopped in as the title when it was used as a placeholder by the programmers. The name stuck, and the marketing and growth of Infocom forever enshrined the word with the game.
The entry, “A Note on the Word Zork“, utilizes a number of predecessors to the word (such as zorch) that were in MIT slang from the 1950s, and paws around for a few pieces of literature, writing and citation that might have caught the eye of either the Zork creators, or people who then influenced the Zork creators.
What’s interesting about this sort of speculative work is that it is, by its nature, transient – over time a more firm connection might be found, or no connection ever found. It’s the kind of work that can be thankless, or tossed aside by a few choice words of the still-living creators. But it’s a great exercise, and I’m glad Nick has done it.
