Get Lamp

Jason Scott is presenting a long gone era of computer games: text adventure games. I was specifically fascinated by the documentary's peek into the culture of Infocom. Here was a company that was founded on an uncertain premise -- to make some sort of business software -- yet it somehow stumbled upon interactive fiction. As the company grew, it became a Mecca for smart, literate, inquisitive people who would start out as testers and end up designing and writing their own games. This made it all the more sad when Infocom, like all other text adventure game companies, suddenly went away in the late 1980s. I'm glad the story of Infocom isn't lost!

I quite like Jason Scott's style of collecting as many geeks on camera and let them rant. This already worked quite well in the BBS documentary, but you have to be quite dedicated to the subject to sit through the whole two discs. The collection of talking face is certainly eclectic and at times you're getting a very intimate insight into some of the fans' private lives. The rise and fall of Infocom is documented quite extensively, but have benefited from focus on the most famous/infamous games. I would have expected a bit more on the history of IF, which for some reason got short shrift, but overall a gem of a collection.

The movie seemed a little too personal to me, and I guess in many ways that was the point: it was a love letter to this type of gaming. A love letter to first generation gamers. In that sense, there were definitely some poignant lines on people reflecting on their work in these games/genre/time period. But I also thought there was a missed opportunity to show how this type of gaming really morphed into many of the popular games that we see today. To take one example, the common threads are so distinct going backwards from Lionhead's Fable series (third generation console gamers) to Sierra's King Quest (second generation PC gamers) all the way back to Adventure (first generation "computer" gamer). There's also the obvious example of Myst!

I think there were missed opportunities to create a great documentary (that could have had universal appeal amongst gamers). But if you were involved with interactive fiction, played interactive fiction, or just generally want to know where gaming got its start, the documentary is worth a look-see.

This is an excellent documentary for those interested in Interactive Fiction, or old-school text adventure games like Infocom created in the '80s. It is the only documentary on the subject and the director manages to interview many of the luminaries who created this genre. The disk also includes mini-documentaries on Colossal Cave and Infocom as well as a series of shorter interviews that didn't make it into the film. If you ever geeked out to Zork, Deadline or Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, you will enjoy this film. That said, I am not sure it works for a mainstream audience who are not familiar with this genre.

"They were called 'computer adventure games', and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind." A documentary that tells the story of text adventures through the words of the people who made them, it's taken digital historian Jason Scott five years of researching, interviewing, filming, editing and polishing. And it was worth waiting.

This is oral history at its best.