ASCII by Jason Scott

Gold fell into my filmmaking lap today. Pure, refined gold.

I recently put a teaser trailer to the GET LAMP/Text Adventure Documentary up on the site and uploaded it to youtube. Checking the referrer logs and a couple other sources, I discovered there was another location to view a copy of the trailer, and that a lot of people were viewing it that way.

One of the classic entities that bottom-feed the content related to media is a site called gametrailers.com. They collect trailers, put them up, classify them to some degree, and then allow downloads and messages with ads sprayed down both sides. Fair enough; hope the weather’s nice down there. The trailer’s licensed in such a way that they can do that.

But taken another way, this was spectacular. I have no affiliation with gametrailers. They put it up and subject their (large) audience against it, and between the first of September and now it’s been viewed over three thousand times.

But more critically than that, it allows people to comment on the trailers. And here’s the gold, because I get immediate, non-affected-by-me feedback about the effect of the subject matter and the approach I took with the trailer. I get it without being in the face of the person, inciting them to agree with me or be contrarians or otherwise change their output based my presence. I just get the flat-out reaction.

The reactions are here and here’s an archived version of same, as things are different with me betraying knowledge of the link and sending readers there.

The teaser trailer is obfuscative, no doubt about that – it never says “text adventures” (doesn’t say “get lamp”, either), it doesn’t tell you who anybody is or what, for example, Steve Meretzky (the first face you see/hear), is talking about. (He’s talking about his time at Infocom). The music is strangely sad. The shots are odd, although one is definitely of a computer-like nature (the printout of source from Super Stud, the pre-version of Softporn Adventure put out by On-Line Systems, later Sierra On-Line). But nobody says computers have much to do with it, other than maybe Nick Montfort using the term “Virtual World”. In other words, it functions like a teaser trailer often does, as a kind of fogged-glass glance into a room of activity without much clarity as to what’s going on until you walk into the front door. This delights and damns the audience, to various degrees. I know all this, so those choices were, if not 100% conscious, ones that I can observe looking at the final work.

So naturally, dropped without too much context on the group, we get a percentage who are just sideswiped with confusion, and enough to post about it:

DarkZeen
And this is?

Spawn7
huh

malyarchuc
what are they talking about? a game? a movie? a book?

JulianP
I’m confuzzled.

A percentage of these go on like this, something in the range of roughly 10 to 15 percent. They don’t know what the hell is being talked about and there’s scant little for them to then run off to. Obviously getlamp.com works but that’s not particularly obvious and besides, a lot of people don’t really feel like going on an easter egg hunt to get what the hell’s being referred to. So there’s one expected bit from the teaser trailer – some folks are just confused and they’re lost (for the moment, until, with luck, they hear of it in a more concrete form).

Next are the people who do know what’s being talked about, and want the others to know:

lvl54spacemonkey
It’s a documentary film about Text Adventure games that were common on early computers. Hitchikers guide to the galaxy had an awesome one. The phrase “get lamp” came from one but I can’t remember what. It was a command to, unsurprisingly, get a lamp. If you’ve never played a text adventure you should try it once. They are real difficult. Especially the early ones that required exact wording for all the commands.

Sarkan
lvl54spacemonkey, thank you. was trying to write a sensible answer to this. And god yes, text based adventure games were awsome games. Miss these kind of games, where puzzles were solved, due to your imagination being able to create a picture of the scene at hand, just due to the text. Text adventure games and the adventure RPG’s you got in book form. Good times good times…… Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stil is one of my favorite text based games! Just wish I could remember where “Get lamp” was from… though it could just be a general refrence to the way you played these games; “pick up toothbrush.” or “open door”.. “go west”. 🙂 again, good times… good times..

AtomicMime
Haha, people who are confused are displaying their youth for all to see…..
….or maybe they’re just not geeks AND old… …like me.

Ryddah
its a text input adventure game…. you type WALK EAST and you get a back a description of your new surroundings. Kinda like your point and click adventure without the pointing or clicking or anything else really.
Think Monkey Island but played thru console commands and without comedy.

So what we see there are people who feel they want to explain the subject, who take enough of an interest to spur further discussion about what it is and what I’m doing the movie on (in some way). Obviously they don’t know me or what direction I might take, but this set of obtuse references was enough to make them reconsider the subject and tell others about it.

Then, of bigger interest, are the people who see it and aren’t pleased:

jaymathews
I didnt get the trailer. Sounds interesting…but I dont know what this is :/

Shuckles
text adventure film, rubbish

UziSuicide
get lame

Color
Hey, King of Kong was kickass….but this does look kind of boring.
Maybe it was just Billy Mitchell…

Poppinfresh
Kind of a dumb name, but i guess it fits.

And then, finally, the people who see it, get what’s being talked about, and are happy to see it. Some of them seem to know of me, even if they don’t know me personally.

Radamathys
Interesting, kinda taking an old and one of the very first concepts of interacting gaming and turning it into a film, this was before my time, so i don’t a whole lot about it, but it look very interesting none of the less.

Trellisaze
The name’s not catchy at all, but otherwise it looks incredible.

DavidRaine
Fantastic! I grew up on Interactive Fiction; I’ll have to find this when it comes out. I see the director has also created a BBS documentary, but that’s a bit before my time.

What do I learn coming away from this selection? Well, as expected, people are shut out by the odd approach to the trailer. There’s definitely people who would want to see a “text adventure movie”, while others are highly skeptical of the idea. The title is odd (hence I registered textadventuredocumentary.com as well) and so any promotional material will likely say “the text adventure documentary” or similar subtitle under it. I should be mindful that people will have no idea what a text adventure is (I already was doing that) while others remember them with fondness. And some people are excited about it, just watching the trailer.

Not a total wow, not a total flop. It is very very bad to make a film to try and please the most people; you please nobody. Hardcores will like it, I hope, and as much of the general audience to bring in as I can I will. But not, ultimately, at the expense of it being cohesive.

More tea leaves to read between edits. Pure gold.

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Archivists don’t always talk about it, but you have to do refreshes occasionally if you really want your stuff to survive. Pawing through piles, blowing off dust, scrubbing down computers. It doesn’t matter how nice your facility is but you have to do these things. And my facility (my house) ain’t so nice. I’ve been going through my collections/projects in my office and found a bunch of stuff that I have to get moving on.

Among this is cd.textfiles.com, that erstwhile collection of shareware CD-ROMs and CD-ROM-based archive stuff that has ballooned well past every other site on textfiles.com. Weighing in around 205gb, it’s just a monster to deal with. But that’s not the problem.

The problem is I’m about to triple its size.

Some time ago, I was asked to provide ISO images of these CD-ROMs where possible, providing pristine digital captures of the data. I agreed, along with label scans and the rest. These will be added to cd.textfiles.com over time. Additionally, I’ll be adding Apple Macintosh disks, in some way that makes sense. (It’s a little weird to add them.) I have over 100 of those to add. And their ISOs.

So really, there’s this cascading flood of data I’m about to blow out onto the net. It’s going to make a lot more stuff available. It’s going to be quite exciting. It’s also meant I bought another hard drive I’m installing into the server, a 750gb, to handle all this incoming data.

This, and all the similar issues I’m encountering, are delightful crises; the problem of too much stuff, the problem of too much interesting things to do, the problem of so many things to accomplish. My days are not filled with aimless wandering; they’re filled with excitement of wondering which amazing thing to work on, and how much more of stuff to add to the piles.

It’s a busy bunch of months ahead, indeed.

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I doubt this has seen the light of day for 13 years.

While doing compilation and collection of media for GET LAMP I found a 1994 CD-ROM insert for a magazine that contained audio/graphical reviews of various contemporary computer games, as well as a preview for a number of other games, including the never-finished “Planetfall II: The Search for Floyd” (or Planetfall III, as it was sometimes called).

Also contained on this CD was an interview with Steve Meretzky, in the middle of doing work with Boffo, Legend of Entertainment, and potentially working with Activision on the Planetfall project. He’s 37 years old, and in good spirits.

The interview was actually 40 320×240 VFW 1.1 (Video for Windows) clips, which connected to a DOS program that would summon them in a window as you pressed different buttons. Separately was a data file with the questions they asked (or, more accurately, grafted onto the clips afterwards, because some only tangentially connect to what Steve is saying).

I’ve gone ahead and yanked these clips into my video editor, added the questions as title cards between them, and rendered it, giving you a 16-minute video interview with Steve Meretzky that likely, as I said, hasn’t been seen for over a decade.

Grab the MPEG-2 video file here. (94mb, 0:16:26).

But wait, there’s more.

The disc also contained a (again, only workable through the DOS program) preview of this version of Planetfall, including initial graphics and screenshots. I’ve gone ahead and edited that into something usable.

So go ahead and grab that here. (21mb, 0:02:17). Or, if you prefer, this one was small enough to fit as a youtube video.

So what happened?

As I understand it, creative differences between Meretzky and the producer over the direction and approach to the finished product was a major reason for the project ultimately being shut down; other reasons might have gone into it that are lost to time. Either way, the world lost out on what likely would have been a great little game.

Steve Meretzky gives great interviews (I have a couple with him of my own). This is no exception.

What else is in my collection that I haven’t found yet?

Update: I have been told that this interview was conducted by John Voorhees, who also authored the original software for the question and answer setup, and that these days he’s a folksinger at johnvoorhees.com.

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I have a friend.

He’s not a close friend; we don’t talk on the phone, and we don’t live in the same area, but in a room of people I don’t know well I’d be very likely to walk over to him and start talking. Online life breeds a lot of friendships like this, and perhaps they’re not as great as the buddy you hang out with in person all the time, but I don’t mind.

My friend and his other friends bought a toy.

It’s a very nice toy, somewhat expensive, but really cool in that way that toys built to be fashionable are. It looks nice, and the toymaker told a lot of people about it all over the world so a lot of people heard about the toy and many thought they wanted one.

The toy was broken.

Not completely broken, of course, because if the toy was completely broken my friend and his friends would have asked for their money back and gotten a different toy. But the toy was just working enough that most people would think it was working completely, or overlook any broken parts because it might be fun.

My friend fixed the toy.

Now, as it turned out, the toy was pretty broken but easily fixed. If you swapped some parts out of it, snapped off some wires and whirlygigs inside the toy, it would work properly. My friend and his friends figured out how to do this, and let a lot of people know about it. People who would buy the toy would find out they could make the toy even better.

The toymaker didn’t like this.

But the toymaker broke the toy in the first place so obviously he wanted it to stay broken, so his opinion wasn’t all that relevant to how broken it was. And anyway, it wasn’t his toy anymore. He sold it to my friend and his friends, and they paid full price for it, and so it was theirs. It wasn’t rented, borrowed, or stolen.

So some guys with machine guns showed up at my friend’s house a little while ago. At 7am.

Again… Machine guns. 7am. Because he fixed a broken toy.

Oh, sure, the toymaker makes a lot of noise and throws out a lot of numbers and can, definitely point to a law the toymaker got passed that makes fixing broken toys illegal, and I can totally understand that we’re now in a situation where fixing broken toys breaks the law and therefore my friend broke the law and so he should have guys with machine guns show up at 7am to arrest him. I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to like it at all.

What did we give away, 9 years ago?

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…because it’s no good for the projects I’m working on if I die!

Simply put, my muscle mass has increased significantly this year, and so my weight, that is, the basic number, has risen. If I went by the number alone, I’d look pretty bad, but my body mass index is going more towards the muscle and away from being a big marshmallow, which is where it was. Even looking at the Defcon video I linked to, I can see the difference in my shoulders and gait. I’ve moved, as of last week, to a much more intense schedule, where I’m going to the gym on any night I’m at home. (Obviously I don’t go while traveling in other states, where I can’t get to the gym and am running around for the sake of the production).

For my trip to Seattle/Oregon and PAX, I drove over 800 miles in the weekend to be able to interview people, and that took a toll on my legs, making them beyond sore and contributing to more kidney stones (or maybe just aggravating already extant stones, which is more likely). So there are times I just can’t run for an hour, and I have to concentrate on upper body stuff. So be it.

The point is, I’m not stopping. I’ve passed the gate, I’m over the hump, I’m doing this thing. Workouts are now a part of my life and I don’t know if it’ll make me look like a sculpture or if it’ll just be something in the background that explains why I pick stuff up easier. Either way things go, I know I’m doing myself some big favors that will help me down the line.

Now, check out these guns! Hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

1 Comment

Oh, how very lucky you are, my friends.

A mere three years ago I posted a review of the musical version of The Last Starfighter, an unexpectedly touching and well-arranged stage production of the 1984 film about an arcade game turning out to be an alien recruitment tool. I gushed in buckets about how I walked into the theater expecting a campy and dashed production and instead got a deep and emotional experience, and a realization that geekdom can reach new levels.

The musical’s success ramped up the more people heard of it until by the end of its too-short run it played to a packed house. (Granted, it was a small house, but still, a packed house night after night!) And then it was gone, leaving behind an excellent cast album and some very special memories.

Well, like I said, your lucky day has arrived: The Last Starfighter Musical is returning.

It’ll be playing in New York City from September 28th through to October 7th, with a handful of performances available for you to enjoy this pinnacle of geekdom. I’ve already written, to great length, in my previous weblog entry about how the musical was for me personally and how the scenes flowed in a musical format; trust me, it’s everything you could imagine it’d be like.

I could spend paragraphs convincing you why you should go, but really, the phrase “Last Starfighter Musical” will either light a switch within you like a Manchurian Candidate or it will not. If it does, then I must merely have notified you of the fact this event is happening to look forward to seeing you there.

Why are you still reading this?

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So, I had the opportunity to go to PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo, in Seattle. I had a great time, enjoyed the combination old-E3 room and the levels of pure gaming going on, and so on. The concerts were good, I met Wil Wheaton, and got to play a bunch of upcoming games. All in all, I’d do it again, and intend to.

MC Frontalot was in attendance, and so we hung out a bit, and he let me know that one of the panels would show the “It is Pitch Dark” video we shot as a “World Premiere”. Naturally, I went along for the ride and was in the room. It was the first thing they played, and audience reaction seemed good for suddenly being subjected to a 5 minute video out of the blue.

So, someone bootlegged it! Held up what was either a cell-phone camera or a regular camera (I can’t tell) and just flat-out recorded the thing in shaky-cam auto-focus majesty, then put it on YouTube.

Am I annoyed? Nah. Imagine that I have something I made people consider worthwhile to sneak out to the world. That’s pretty cool. I won’t link to their site, though. Frontalot indicated he will probably put the video out for general download soon, and so will I, at that point. There’s a lot of detail missed in this shaky-cam wonder, so you might want to get the point and then watch the “real” thing later.

2 Comments

Roy of SAC posted a copy of the video recording of my talk at DEFCON, “The Edge of Forever: Saving Computer History”.

This was kind of a Hail Mary pass to get into DEFCON; a general nebulous subject, a short explanation of what I was going to do, and graciously, DEFCON’s organizers accepted the speech. I was planning for a one hour (50 minute) speech and then saw that they’d blocked off 2 hours of talk for me. So, I added a couple stories in and blew it out to an hour and a half, plus another 20 minutes of question and answer. I’ve had worse days.

I’ll avoid giving too much context to this speech; I figure it stands on its own, pro or con.

You can watch it here.

5 Comments

The leaves turn color

The forums await your skill

To prevail is all

As we wind down our time together, Internet Warrior, I will show you one last technique. It is insidious, a rampant virus that can pull down not just a thread but all further discussion on that sub-board. It is to be handled carefully, as one carries a multi-faceted knife. This technique is to mirror the past.

In any discussion, one must merely bring up the past; wistfully, happily, as one recalls all good things in one’s history. Then, standing back, your victims will too recount their own pasts, sharing a smile at the times that have passed between them.

Boy, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we? I remember when it was just a couple people who know about this… now the entire scene is filled with people who don’t know where we came from….

So insidious is this technique, warrior, that you should only consider it a last result, when all other attempts to dominate have failed. Your enemies will fall upon each other with vigor, each working to outdo each other in nostalgia and memory, of details and ideas they’d thought no-one would have cared to hear, until you designated it the coin of the realm.

I wish you well, Internet Warrior, in all your studies and in all forums you will dominate and destruct in the pursuit of victory.

What is that, you ask?

No, it is merely some dust that has caught itself in your teacher’s eye.

Now go.

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We have come so far in so short a time, Internet Warrior. Your deft appraisal of our lessons and the skill which you have shown in using them brings to mind the memory of xxMartin56xx, who could drag a conversation regarding beekeeping into a forum-destroying political meltdown. Perhaps you too will be spoken of in these halls after your passage.

As our teachings progress, Internet Warrior, so too do the subtleness of our discipline and our techniques. The best Warrior appears to be a contributing member, willing to share his information and attention with his opponents, until it is too late to have known otherwise. A mis-step will lead to your discovery, but a sure-footed stance and deftness of touch will ensure victory.

To Blur in Clear Sight is to become the ultimate double-agent; appearing to be the most productive of a forum while quietly ruining it. Beyond the destruction of a thread, beyond the lifting of heads away from the matter at hand, to Blur in Clear Sight is to render the entire idea of conversation moot and mortally wounded.

I see you shift uneasily where you stand, unsure where to begin. This is normal, for it is a mode of thinking so insidious that you are lying nearly to yourself in your efforts to control and fling the conversation into blessed and enveloping darkness. Watch carefully.

Hey there, first time poster to this movie board. Some quick thoughts.

Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors. I’ve seen everything of his I could find, from the Lodger up through to Family Plot. I am having a lot of trouble finding some of the other early works on DVD and perhaps someone can tell me some of the more reputable DVD firms to purchase copies of them (I’ve gotten burned on some of the resellers at conventions and would prefer to “buy honest”, as it were). I’ve also read a bunch of biographies of the man and he just gets more fascinating the further and further I look into him; I’m especially tickled pink by his escapades under the studio system and his television appearances. I wouldn’t mind discussing some of the more controversial statements he made, either. There’s a sense of wonder in the way he planned his movies and the approach he took to the composition of the frame. I’ve made the occasional home movie to try and replicate this approach (mail me if you’re interested in having a copy of some of them; VHS quality only, sorry). I don’t know of many other movie directories who’ve planned their works this extensively any other time in the mid-20th century, but wouldn’t mind hearing of them, should there be some films I should watch. Properly addressed, I should get to everyone, thanks so much for having this forum!

Your eyes unfocus reading this paragraph, Warrior, and that is how it should be. It is tiring, sapping of energy in every turn. It provides a number of opinions but then requires facts, endless seas of facts that would require research and effort on the part of the community to fulfill. In a deluge of queries and statements, the reader must divest themselves of points uninteresting to them while struggling to find points worth pursuing. All indications are that answering your queries, time-consuming they may be, will result in yet more cascades of topics and investigation. In this way, you drown your opponents, not in a deep and avoidable lake, but in a consistent six inches of wet, slippery mud.

Left alone, your messages will signal a poison, carefully hidden within a gleaming fruit of energy and enthusiasm. The forum’s topics will blur, lost in a haze of your messages, until no enemy who knows his territory will venture there further.

You smile, Internet Warrior… you see the masterstroke in this. Take a walk with me; we will ponder the endless and shifting forms of nature and compose these quicksand paragraphs together. None shall stand against you once you have mastered them.

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