I got my hands on packages of the final, completed GET LAMP package, with the completed, mastered and duped DVDs. I’ve inspected the product, played through all the parts, the features, the hidden aspects, and the DVD-ROM section. It’s a go. It’s perfect, it’s what I wanted. So yes, GET LAMP is, by my standards, a real product.
I’ve gone ahead and switched the “pre-order” page and title to “order“. Orders made now will ship out next week. It’s a real thing. As I can I’ll add the other payment options and flesh out the website to include more information, but right now, it’s a product.
I’m currently in a hotel room in Las Vegas, the week of DEFCON and CG Expo, two big events that will have a large audience for this movie and DVD. As per plans and payments made weeks ago, I’m here with 260 copies of GET LAMP, shrinkwrapped and in boxes. (This is how I know it’s a product.) At my home are another 1100 copies, representing the pre-orders. I paid a notable sum to ensure to have all the copies everywhere they needed to be.
The original plan had been to ship the pre-orders from the 1100 copies and then have sales here in Vegas. That’s not going to happen. The pre-orders have to start shipping on August 2nd, and from then on.
The biggest hitch I hit was that when it was announcing shipping would happen, people started contacting me in droves to get new shipping addresses for the products. If it had been a few, I could have had my friends who are ready to do fulfillment place those aside – but it ended up being dozens and dozens. They’re still coming in. With thousands of dollars of postage required to do this shipping, it quickly outgrew the chance for me to drop this in the lap of my friends. I need to supervise this personally. (My friends said they’d come over to help to make sure it all happens fast.)
But this means that I will be selling items here at the event before pre-orders get shipped out. While I hope I made clear this situation wasn’t intentional, I do know it says something different than I’ve said up to this point. I know some people will be annoyed. But I hope people will understand what caused it to be this way. Obviously, the coins are numbered in order of people buying copies, so nobody here in Vegas is getting a sub-1100 number for their coins.
The weblog changes from this point – from speculation and explanation of ideas to news of fulfillments, reviews, and upcoming screenings, with and without me. This is the fun part – when people finally get a chance to see what I’ve spent the last four years working on.
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.
It also stands as my least favorite editing job, ever, for myriad reasons. The result of the editing job, I really really like. But the job itself? Egad.
First, the subject is obscure and ethereal, while also being of general interest and something people have opinions on – the worst of both worlds. Then, there was the process of piecing together many hours, dozens of them, to come up with the best statements that fit together – but it was all essentially about one subject. And then there was the part where I wanted it to be intensely interesting, even if you didn’t work with puzzles all the time. And finally, it had to flow as smooth as it could without dragging.
So it’s a short branch, under 18 minutes. It’s also packed with all sorts of opinions, people, and scans of design documents. And of course I put a few puzzles in.
I’m happy when I can take a subject I didn’t think anyone would cover and turn it into something giving that subject respect – hence once of my favorite pieces of work, the Fidonet Episode of the BBS Documentary, which tells a 15-year arc of a story about a computer network and somehow generally ties it together enough that’s actually coherent and in some cases entertaining. So that’s definitely the case here.
I err in the side of short length because there’s not a specific story arc that’s being brought out in talking about puzzles – just a lot of different (well-spoken) opinions and ideas and a way for you to see how deeply these folks have thought about this specific angle of interactive fiction/text adventures. I’d rather have people wish there was more than have them wish there was less. As the raw interviews will generally be released, you can listen to some very smart folks say some very smart things for hours and hours if you wish – I just don’t know if you need that to be on an edited DVD.
What’s left now is the finish editing the Modern Cycle and the Infocom Featurette, and then we’re in the polish stage. Hooray!
During PAX East, a postcard was released with a ground-up explanation of interactive fiction and how to play it. It’s meant to be something you can print out or put on a card and show people who’ve either never played text adventures or who could use a quick brush-up of what the whole thing means. Written by Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin, it’s a lot of information nicely presented in a small space.
The card is available at screen resolution, PDF format, 300dpi printable and a number of other formats at the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction. The PRIF is a new Cambridge-based initiative to discuss contemporary IF and what it all means, plus discuss projects and outreach. I interviewed several people involved with this project, although not about the project itself. Still, I can vouch that these are very smart people who have done a lot for interactive fiction and it’s great they’re reaching out like this.
Grab the card for yourself, friends, or anyone else you want to introduce to the world of IF.
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 contacted a while ago by Richard Rutenberg, a fun and dedicated fellow who has been spending quite some time making a voice-activated version of the original Adventure/Colossal Cave! Available at 610-DEAR-BEN (610-332-7236), a quick visit to his website, 610dearben.com, and you can see the leaderboard, learn of projects to translate to other languages, and just marvel someone spent this time doing this.
Initially, the thing ran a bit slow – now it’s fast as lightning. Trust me, it’s worth a couple tries. Give it a whirl.
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.
