"Before computer games arrived on the scene, kids amused themselves with choose-your-own-adventure books that allowed you to explore fantastic worlds that were described without the aid of fancy graphics.
"As computers became a little more powerful, these were translated into text-only adventure games that retained the spartan aesthetic, but allowed the player a little more control over their exploration of the world. For example, you'd type "north" to move north, where you'd then "look" around a scene before deciding how to interact further."
Uh... No.
"Colossal Cave", the first text based Adventure game: 1976, by William Crowther, running on a PDP-10. By '77 it had been ported to Unix.
"The Cave of Time", the first Choose Your Own Adventure book: 1979.
Packard wrote one of the first known books of this type, Sugarcane Island, in 1969 and saw it first published in 1976 by Vermont Crossroads Presshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Packard
It seems to me that the two ideas developed more or less in parallel. It says something about the way that culture develops that this idea arrived in print only when digital technology was just making it possible (but far from mainstream).
Dungeons and Dragons also independently arrived at the same time--first published in 1974, so clearly in development before that. It seems like our culture was just ready.
Correction: The first interactive novel was Sugarcane Island, published in '76. Two others ones, rather obscure and unknown, were published in '77, and '78: "Deadwood City" and "Third Planet from Altair". The idea didn't really kick off, however, until the Choose Your Own Adventure series began in 1979.
It seems clear that the development of Adventure-style games and the interactive novel were independent of one another.
The article's version of events yields a more intuitive narrative flow.
> ...the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists" instead of "Ravenous Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists") they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf. http://flag.blackened.net/dinsdale/dna/book2.html
Someone correct me if I'm missing something, but this has nothing to do with the Kindle.
It's a website that lets you play the games[1]. A minimalist website, slightly more minimal than any I've seen which does this, but a website nonetheless. Any device which has a web browser has access to this website, the Kindle is just an example of one.
They could've labelled it for the Nook, or Sony's e-readers, or anything. The iPhone has access to it as well. It's news only because someone decided such websites are worthy of news, and made one into a high-profile example.
The only thing which has any relevance to the Kindle is that there's a referral link to buy one on the site.
The Kindle connection is really just setup for this (fantastic) closing paragraph:
> Of course, with the e-readers' lack of a backlight, you won't be able to play in the dark. But that's probably just as well. You might get eaten by a grue.
Are you sure? The most recent figures I've been able to find suggest the Nook out-selling the Kindle in March, and I see no reason for that to reverse when the Nook's update makes it far better than the original, and B&N is a mega-seller of anything in its stores.
I think I've seen one Nook 'in the wild' on public transit in Boston. I often see people with kindles, sometimes more than one person on a subway platform. And I've been seeing even more lately - people using the new black ones.
Interesting. Can I see your figures? As far as I know Amazon has never released any, only to say that it is be best selling SKU on Amazon. And they are selling it in Target stores now as well...
Just these, the source of which seems to be repeated all over the internet, and I can't attest to any amount of validity aside from their widespread use:
Wholly agree. I just can't find any other info, and everything else is based off (hopefully) less precise data. Like hunches, or single-site polls, or who's-seen-what.
Note that there is already a very high-quality Z-machine interpreter in Javascript available to any device that has a modern web browser (e.g. tablets:)
I just got done watching the 2nd DVD from Get Lamp and I was throughly impressed. I'd watched it at PAX East prior, and then the 1st DVD a few weeks ago. The 2nd DVD goes into some excellent depth.
Plus he isn't just making movies, but like you say, preserving history with his massive archives.
If it works for text adventure games, then it will work for the command line, vi and other tools of that era (apart from the missing "ESC" key), with multi-week battery life.
When I was in middle school, someone had a TI calculator that was programmed with a rudimentary choose your own adventure style game. It was really cool!
I played it for 5 minutes and then seriously considered getting a pencil and paper to start drawing out a map like I used to do. I forgot how addictive these games were!
"Before computer games arrived on the scene, kids amused themselves with choose-your-own-adventure books that allowed you to explore fantastic worlds that were described without the aid of fancy graphics.
"As computers became a little more powerful, these were translated into text-only adventure games that retained the spartan aesthetic, but allowed the player a little more control over their exploration of the world. For example, you'd type "north" to move north, where you'd then "look" around a scene before deciding how to interact further."
Uh... No.
"Colossal Cave", the first text based Adventure game: 1976, by William Crowther, running on a PDP-10. By '77 it had been ported to Unix.
"The Cave of Time", the first Choose Your Own Adventure book: 1979.