GET LAMP continues to sell, regularly, to people who are finding out that such a documentary was made. I like to think they’ve really enjoyed what they’ve gotten in the mail. Someone asked a while ago if there were “still coins”. Well, there are – as many as copies that have been made, so if you order you still get one of the coins.

Recently, someone was shipped a duplicate, and he gave the copy to a friend who then went off to review it. The resulting review is rather positive.

Since the last entry, I’ve done a couple showings here and there of the film, but I was especially pleased to have a showing at Google, with none other than Don Woods and Marc Blank in the audience. I’d brought Don out for the GET LAMP premiere at PAX East, but I’d not seen Marc since our interview – and he looks great!

As with my previous work, the idea for these films is to provide something that wasn’t there before, and be a delight for people who remember a subject or are curious about it, and get all the information and backstory they could want. It’s doing that, and I’m happy to be part of the tech documentary landscape.

As I write this, a huge batch is going out, all over the world (well over half of the GET LAMP copies go outside of the US), and I hope to make a lot more people happy about this film in months to come.

Thanks for checking up!

Hoylen Sue has lots of cool photos from his tour, including several historical explorer huts and lots of penguins! Thanks for bringing one of the coins for the trip!

The Pen is a Livescribe, a really neat little gadget that tracks your movement of a pen-like device, and which then makes it into words which it saves in memory.

You can watch the whole clip, or, if you prefer, jump right to the part when he starts playing Zork.

Come on! That’s amazing!

However, Rob O’Hara’s dad wanted to do something much more elaborate. So he gave his son a treasure chest with a puzzle, and made his son solve it to get the treasure inside:

Check out the entry to see how it went.

INTERACTIVE FICTION TYPEWRITER

Actually, an Arduino-controlled typewriter, that can do most anything, but can play interactive fiction for our entertainment.  A buddy I’ve known for a few years, Jim Munroe, was partially behind this. He counts as one of the missed documentary interviews, but it’s a pleasure to link to this.

DEATHTRAP DUNGEON!

A paper adventure, the author of which credits GET LAMP for inspiration.

It’s in the style of the Parsely adventures, of which there’s a nice amount to browse through here.

A HOUSE IN CALIFORNIA

Buddy Jake Elliott worked hard on a game.

From his letter to me:

‘A House in California’ is a surreal, narrative game about four characters who bring a house to life. These four characters are based on relatives of mine (two grandmothers and two great-grandmothers). The game is inspired aesthetically by Mystery House, developed in 1980 by Roberta & Ken Williams. But whereas Mystery House is a mystery story about greed and murder, A House in California is more like an Imagist poem about family and memory. A House in California is currently being featured in the Learn to Playexhibition at Euphrat Museum of Art, was also exhibited at the Meaningful Playconference at Michigan State University in October 2010 and is an entry in the 2011 IGF.

Enjoy these links!

Well, he’s going to try.

Plotkin has announced a Kickstarter campaign where he will create a game called Hadean Lands, full-time. Designed for the iPhone with other platforms available during the fundraising, he will quit his job, write the game, work on the development environment, and release a bunch of code so others can follow in his footsteps.

He opened it for a little more than 30 days of potential funding, with a goal of $8000 to supplement his savings. He made $8000 in thirteen hours.

He’s now past $20,000 and growing. If you want to show support for someone doing interactive fiction, this is a great way to do it; Plotkin is the real deal and as his page explains, he has a very long pedigree both as an excellent author, and as a coder who has advanced the state of the programs that drive interactive fiction’s development.

I contributed almost immediately; I suggest others do as well.

Luckily there’s a satellite link for internet and here I am. After this lull (during which I need to mail out a huge amount of orders), I have showings pretty much all next week. Here’s some details on them.

CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY, PITTSBURGH, PA, OCTOBER 4, 5PM

I have a showing at 5pm. My appearance is sponsored by the School of Computer Science, the Game Creation Society and CMU Computer Club and will be at Rashid Auditorium, Gates&Hillman Centers 4401, at 5pm.

SETON HILL UNIVERSITY, GREENSBURG, PA, OCTOBER 5, 7PM

After sitting in for some classes with Dennis Jerz from the film, there’ll be a showing that evening at 7pm. Details galore from this press release from Seton Hill: “Scott will present Get Lamp, a documentary on word-driven computer games in Seton Hill University’s Media Sphere, which is located behind Cecilian Hall in the Administration Building on the University’s hilltop campus. This event is open to the public and there is no fee to attend.”

TUFTS UNIVERSITY, MEDFORD, MA, OCTOBER 6, 7:30PM

Tufts is doing this awesome Interactive Fiction Month for October 2010, and I’m one of the events. I’ll be at the Tisch AV Room 304, along with Nick Montfort and Andrew Plotkin from the film. There’s all sorts of crazy cool presentations for the month, so check those out.

ALPHA ONE LABS, BROOKLYN, NY, OCTOBER 7, 7PM

An excellent hackerspace in Brooklyn, Alpha One labs is having a showing of my film on October 7th at 7pm. You need to get a free ticket to show up, so go to the page to get your information and ticket.

Man, maybe I need an opening act.

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.

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.)

You can read the weblog entry about the episode, or download the high-quality version or just check out the youtube entry for it, which I will embed below.

And it’s spoiler free!

It’s going to be a great year for interactive fiction – I can feel it.

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.

And that’s the story of the guy.