So the initial experiment with Chuck Benton turns out to have been pretty successful – the resulting video is clear, clean, well-mic’d, and provides you pretty much all the relevant statements on the subject of GET LAMP-related ideas. Someone mentioned a cut-off here and there, and unfortunately it’s been too many years to know why I might have done that, but it would never have been to avoid having a clip with something unusual/terrible – it would have been that he stopped and moved onto a new subject.

There is video noise reduction going on, and this slows the whole rendering process absolutely dramatically – it takes something like 4-6 hours for the system to render a 15-20 minute set of clips. As it is, with me in Australia and doing other things, making my machine do this via a VNC connection has very little personal pain of my main machine being tied up, so I’ve moving ahead with whatever are low-hanging fruit.

Therefore, I’m happy to point you to two more interviews uploaded:

Warren Robinett was the creator of Adventure for the Atari 2600, and in doing so, he pioneered all sorts of advances in gameplay for videogames. After a year or two, we finally got things working and we did a very short interview in San Jose – almost all of this material is on the DVD in either the main movie or in a couple bonus features I put him in. In fact, it was so short I remember us finishing and him going “Really? That’s it?” – but that was all I needed and I wasn’t going to grill him on random Atari history in this context. I was just pleased to get what we got.

John Romero contacted me about being in GET LAMP, because he’d done contractor work in his early days as a programmer, and one of those contract jobs was Infocom. I ended up giving him not too much notice, on a Sunday, and he personally let me into the building where he was working and we did the interview just before I drove at top speed to catch a flight out of California.  There’s all this bullshit around this guy from the people whose contribution to gaming was to ensure Frito-Lay stayed in business, but I have now interacted with him multiple times both with this film and elsewhere and he is a fantastic dude, open and generous and informed.

I’ll have more interviews up soon – right now I’m rendering Scott Adams, and the machine has told me it will take 26 hours. Good thing I don’t have to be there! With Scott Adams’ being done, I’ll create a GET LAMP interview collection on archive.org and you can keep track of that.

Hooray for history!

Categorised as: computer history | documentary

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