Aaron A. Reed's Blog, page 4
January 21, 2021
Hunt the Wumpus (1973)
The earliest computer games were made in pockets of isolation hard to imagine in today’s hyper-connected world. Like the first living organisms spawning and dying in countless dark seas before the right warm tide pool helped them thrive, early digital games were invented and lost and reinvented, over and over. Academic communities shared work at conferences and in journals; coworkers in industry computer labs swapped notes and code; but there wasn’t yet anything like the shared pool of ideas and...
January 14, 2021
ROCKET (1972)
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Lunar Module Eagle touched down on the moon, though it had been a close call. With little spare fuel to begin with, pilot Neil Armstrong had needed to dodge unexpected boulders and craters to find a level spot to put down after the LEM had drifted ahead of its planned landing site. When he finally set down the delicate craft, only seconds of descent fuel remained. 17-year-old Jim Storer had been glued to the television at his family home in Massachusetts for the who...
January 8, 2021
The Oregon Trail (1971)
In the midst of the cold but snowless Minnesota December of 1971, a student teacher named Don Rawitsch wheeled a bulky teletypewriter into his 8th grade history class. Students gathered around curiously as he plugged in power and phone cables, switched on the humming machine, and dialed the number on a rotary pad that would connect him to a $100,000 minicomputer fifty miles away. The students, Mr. Rawitsch said, were going to play a game.
Continue reading at the home of my new blog series, “50 Ye...
January 1, 2021
Announcing my new project, “50 Years of Text Games”
This article is cross-posted from the 50 Years of Text Games Substack page, the official home for this series. Please subscribe there if you want to follow it!
The earliest version of The Oregon Trail — made long before the green-tinged ports known by subsequent generations from their school computer labs — was first played by students in a Minnesota classroom on December 3, 1971. It’s now 2021, so the end of this year will mark the 50th anniversary...
June 25, 2020
Code Archaeology with “Super Star Trek”
One of the most interesting things about BASIC programs is their line numbers. Often decried by younger coders as enablers of the dreaded GOTO, they were actually a clever way to enable interactive coding at a time before text editors or even (in some cases) text interfaces. More interestingly for historians, they sometimes allow for some rational reconstructions of software histories in codebases created far before modern version control systems.
A quick BASIC primer for those unfamiliar: each l...
June 23, 2020
Machines for Getting Lost on Purpose
This post is a lightly-edited transcript of a talk I gave of the same title at NarraScope 2020 . It is adapted from a chapter in Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider . Read Part 1 here.
So now we’ve arrived at the present: what KRZ has to say about today.
As with the Xanadu story, I think a lot of the game works on multiple levels, commenting on both society at large while also being in dialogue with it...
June 20, 2020
Machines for Getting Lost on Purpose
This post is a lightly-edited transcript of a talk I gave of the same title at NarraScope 2020 . It is adapted from a chapter in Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider .
Kentucky Route Zero is a game deeply concerned with both the past and future of adventure games. Across its five acts it tells a mysterious, wistful, and entrancing story about hard times, friendships and found families, and living with ...
April 2, 2020
The 2020 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction
Im very pleased to announce the opening of the 2020 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, continuing an annual tradition started by IF author Adam Cadre back in 2002. This years festival (coincidentally) debuts exactly twenty new interactive stories from authors working across the spectrum of text games, from Twine to Inform to Ink to Texture to RenPy and more.
Participants chose to place their games in either the Main Festival, where they were eligible for a Best In Show ribbon and ...
February 2, 2020
0202-2020
My book Subcutanean is a horror novel where no two copies are the same, and in honor of its impending release—and the palindromic date of 02/02/2020—I’m launching two bots, @subcutanean2160 and @subcutanean6621, that will perform readings from different versions simultaneously. Over the next few weeks, each will tweet the entire text of two different versions of Subcutanean: respectively, the versions generated from seeds 02160 and...
January 24, 2020
Subcutanean: Generating the Final Books
After a long development process, earlier today my custom Python script finally generated and rendered the first Subcutanean that will be printed and delivered to a customer. Here’s the moment in all its Terminalglory:
What’s going on here? Kind of a lot. Let’s break it down, shall we? (Or if you need more context first, here’s a gentler introduction to the Subcutanean project.)
This is a custom book for a Singular Subcutanean backer (supporters at this level pledged for a book that included a...
