Text Adventures: Like Watching Paint Dry

By Shane | August 18, 2006

Hardcore gamers between 1979 to 1985 weren’t fortunate enough to lap in the luxury of the games we have today. Back then computers were only capable of around 8 KB – 16 KB so the type of games they played were called text adventures, like Zork, and the idea was simply to control a character around the screen via key commands. It’s like the horse and buggy before the car; Laborious and stinky.

Jason Scott, a Boston filmmaker and Unix system administrator is producing a documentary text adventure film aptly titled Get Lamp about the pioneers of the game era. He also made another documentary called BBS: The Documentary, which is of course about the solitary network Bulletin Board System just before we had this thing called the internet. Even though I’m just pushing 31, I do recall text adventures and BBS’s on the Commodore 64. These films would make an interesting comparison of the technologies we have today, and how far we’ve gone. I need to check these out.

Get Lamp
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via Kfoo