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GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary

Google TechTalks · Youtube · 3 HN points · 11 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Google TechTalks's video "GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary".
Youtube Summary
Google Tech Talk (more below)
March 7, 2011

Presented by Jason Scott.

ABSTRACT

Jason Scott will talk about making the documentary and we'll be screening some portion of the film.

http://www.getlamp.com/

In the early years of the microcomputer, a special kind of game was being played. With limited sound, simple graphics, and tiny amounts of computing power, the first games on home computers would hardly raise an eyebrow in the modern era of photorealism and surround sound. In a world of Quake, Half-Life and Halo, it is expected that a successful game must be loud, fast, and full of blazing life-like action.

But in the early 1980s, an entire industry rose over the telling of tales, the solving of intricate puzzles and the art of writing. Like living books, these games described fantastic worlds to their readers, and then invited them to live within them.

They were called "computer adventure games", and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind.

Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new set of places to explore.

Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them.

Speaker Info:

Jason Scott ( http://www.getlamp.com/director.html )

Jason Scott is a digital historian and archivist who specializes in early microcomputer history and dial-up bulletin board systems. He is the webmaster of textfiles.com, a collection of BBS-era textfiles that has been open to the public since 1998. In 2001, he began filming a documentary about BBSes called "BBS: The Documentary", an 8-episode mini-series about BBSes spanning 25 years and totalling five and a half hours in length. This documentary series was released on 3 DVDs in early 2005. He has been playing text adventures since he was 10, and to this day does not understand why the rod scares the bird.
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He also did a documentary about text adventure games called "GET LAMP" which I enjoyed a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU
⬐
Apr 27, 2020 · Eremotherium on textfiles.com
He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU

GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

and (apart from his many talks) his podcast "Jason Scott talks his way out of it" which is just gem after gem of documented tech ephemera.

https://textfiles.libsyn.com/

It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and all the other great people at the Internet Archive) has affected with his bullheaded conservation efforts.

⬐ bbsanon
Featured in BBS: The Documentary is Anthony Stramaglia. Seeing him here floods back a variety of memories about the North NJ BBS scene. This was truly social networking before FB/MySpace etc. There were quite a variety of IRL scenes that developed from the various BBS networks in the area, particularly through Mr. Stramaglia’s. He was absolutely one of the nicest and most helpful sysops, always willing to share technical knowledge and was a great inspiration for me personally.

Thanks Mr. Scott for making this documentary. The nostalgia is appreciated.

⬐ ethagnawl
Jason Scott's podcast _Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It_ is also endlessly interesting, inspirational, entertaining and touching.

Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/jasonscotttalks

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/textfiles/posts

Oh the MUDs! Props to Forest’s edge and TempusMUD.

Text is the ultimate medium because it directly connects with our imagination. I remember jumping out of my chair after reading a line of text on my screen.

Recommend watching “Get lamp” documentary to fans of MUDs, text adventures and those born after:

https://youtu.be/LRhbcDzbGSU

⬐
If you like text adventure games, check out Jason Scott's documentary GET LAMP about the history of text adventure games, including interviews with some Infocom developers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

http://www.getlamp.com/

⬐
Obligatory links to a great documentary on text adventures and infocom:

http://www.getlamp.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp

Related: there's a few versions of "get lamp" documentary online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU) or you can get the movie directly from getlamp.com.

These histories (the maher link above, the getlamp doc, etc) bring back a lot of great memories.

EDIT: the youtube link above looks like it's actually the getlamp movie being shown at a google event, with an audience (audience sounds in there now and then).

⬐ throwaway7645
A really good documentary. Infocom's game division sounds like it was a magical place to work. The Google before Google.
⬐ ghaff
There are two "official" versions of the documentary. One is a general documentary on interactive text adventures and then there's one that's cut to be more specifically about Infocom. (The latter was particularly interesting to me because I knew a lot of the people involved then and now and actually did some game testing at one point.)
⬐ throwaway7645
I didn't know that, but will look.
⬐ mgkimsal
Would love to read some of your testing experiences re: infocom. Have you posted on this before?
⬐ ghaff
Not a lot to relate. I wasn't an official tester. I just knew a number of the guys--including one of their main designers--from undergrad. So he would sometimes send me a pre-release disk and I'd make notes about things I found confusing or where I got stuck. (And would call him for hints now and then.)

I think I was officially credited as a beta tester for Legend later on but that was just the same sort of thing.

⬐ mgkimsal
Ahh... sounds cool to have been part of it, even in a small way (early copies and all that)!
⬐ BEEdwards
Why isn't there a digital version of this doc?

WTF am I going to do with DVDs?

http://www.getlamp.com/order/

⬐
Nov 28, 2015 · jamesk_au on Get Lamp
You can watch the non-interactive version of the documentary with some commentary by its maker in this Google Tech Talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

Some context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10620142

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619956

http://www.filfre.net/2014/04/down-from-the-top/

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU
Many Infocom employees are present in the documentary Get Lamp:

http://youtu.be/LRhbcDzbGSU

Recommended if text games are of interest to you.

⬐
Jul 13, 2014 · 3 points, 1 comments · submitted by pmoriarty
⬐ pmoriarty
The film itself starts around the 7'30" mark.
On youtube, from a google tech talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU
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