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Activision’s unique “computer novel” Portal was born during a lunch-table conversation around the time of Ghostbusters that involved David Crane, the latter game’s designer, and Brad Fregger, his producer for the project. Presaging a million academic debates still to come, they were discussing the fraught relationship between interactivity and story. Crane argued that it wasn’t possible to construct a compelling experience just by shuffling about chunks of static narrative, that the...| The Digital Antiquarian
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The Theory of Heliocentrism, Chapter 1: The Legacy of the Ancients| The Digital Antiquarian
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For all that it was a period with some significant sparks of heat and light, we might reasonably call the time between 1989 and 1994 the Dark Ages of Interactive Fiction. It was only in 1995 that the lights were well and truly turned on again and the Interactive Fiction Renaissance began in earnest. This was the point when a number of percolating trends — the evolving TADS and Inform programming languages, the new generation of Z-Machine interpreters, the serious discussions of design craft...| The Digital Antiquarian
Like A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity seemed destined to become a casualty of an industry that just wasn’t equipped to appreciate what it was trying to do. Traditional game-review metrics like “fun” or “value for money” only cheapened it, while reviewers lacked the vocabulary to even begin to really address its themes. Most were content to simply mention, in passing and often with an obvious unease, that those themes were present. In Computer Gaming World, for instance, Scorpia said...| The Digital Antiquarian
During 1983, the year that Brian Moriarty first conceived the idea of a text adventure about the history of atomic weapons, the prospect of nuclear annihilation felt more real, more terrifyingly imaginable to average Americans, than it had in a long, long time. The previous November had brought the death of longtime Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the ascension to power of Yuri Andropov. Brezhnev had been a corrupt, self-aggrandizing old rascal, but also a known, relatively safe ...| The Digital Antiquarian
Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, what follows is a tentative plan only. Nonetheless, if you prefer for every article to be a complete surprise when it pops up in your browser, you might want to stop reading now.| www.filfre.net
Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, […]| The Digital Antiquarian
The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.| The Digital Antiquarian
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If you take the time to dig beneath the surface of any human community, no matter how humble, you’ll be rewarded with a welter of fascinating tales and characters. Certainly this is true of Oakhurst, California. The little town nestled in central California’s Yosemite Valley near the western end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains has attracted more than its fair share of dreamers and chancers over the past 175 years or so.| The Digital Antiquarian
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.| The Digital Antiquarian
Act 1: Starcraft the Game| The Digital Antiquarian
David Mullich’s original plan was to write a game inspired by The Prisoner, but not a direct adaptation — an eminently sensible move considering that Edu-Ware did not own the intellectual-property rights to the show and were hardly in a position to purchase them. But Steffin and Pederson, displaying the cavalier attitude toward IP that would soon get them sued for the Space games, not only insisted that the game be called The Prisoner but even planned to use the original series’s distin...| The Digital Antiquarian