Aaron A. Reed's Blog

Kevin Bentley woke up feeling awful, pulling back the curtains of his new apartment in San Mateo, California. Only a year out of high school, the New Jersey native had been hired by local software company Cognetics and turned loose on the project of simply “implementing” a script by well-known science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch: turning it into a fully playable interactive fiction game. No one at Cognetics — or at Harper & Row, Disch’s publisher — seemed to think this ought to be too big a p...

The upcoming 50 Years of Text Games book will hopefully* include this set of two-page spreads with maps of two versions of the classic parser game Adventure, which both popularized and named the text adventure and adventure game genres. Famously, the game was originally created but abandoned by caver/coder Will Crowther, then found a year later and significantly expanded by grad student Don Woods.

(* My take on the map is based on an uncredited vintage plotter print; I’ve redone the labelling, no...

This morning(Thursday June 9th), I’m doing an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit’s popular /r/Games channel. If you’re not familiar with AMAs, it’s basically just a chance to ask someone with an interesting story or project any questions you like (on or off topic) live via posting. The AMA will run Thursday from about 7am PT (10am ET) through 10am PT (1pm ET).

This is a big community with lots of general-interest games folks, so I’m a little nervous about what the reception to a book about (gasp) ga...

My book on the incredible history of interactive fiction launched TODAY on Kickstarter:

Find out how to reserve your copy now!

The book features

650 pages and over 200,000 words of text game historyExtensively researched in a multi-year projectProfessionally offset printed with quality paper and inkFor the hardback, a beautiful faux-leather and foil-stamped coverA lengthy introduction on the pre-history of digital text games, including fascinating early experiments from the 1950s and 60sAn introduc...

When and what was the first digital text shown on a screen? It depends, as always, on your exact definitions of those words. But here’s one plausible candidate.

In 1947, British inventors Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn were playing around with newly invented CRTs (cathode ray tubes) which could use a scanning electron gun to light up individual phosphor dots. The technology would later become ubiquitous as the basis of the television set, but Williams and Kilburn had visions of using it to solv...

Something very cool is coming…

A collectible book about the first half-century of interactive fiction. Deep dives into fifty text games from Zork to Trade Wars to Fallen London to Lifeline. Sign up to be notified on launch & join the adventure!

(You can also find out more details about the project on my Substack.)

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It was the last talk of a long day. On the MIT campus in October 1997, an interdisciplinary symposium called “Transformations of the Book” was taking place, bringing together “classicists, Shakespearean scholars, technological wizards and lovers of all media” to explore how printed books were being challenged and changed by the digital age. The talks had begun just after lunch, and now it was coming up on nine o’clock as the final speaker took the stage: a woman in her mid-twenties. In her autho...

On a spring day in 1990, in a tiny studio theater at Carnegie Mellon — the first university in the world to offer a degree in drama — a most unusual performance took place. The seats were empty except for a handful of computer science researchers, and the only audience member was on the stage. She stood amidst a minimalist set representing a bus station along with a small troupe of improv actors wearing headsets. She’d been told she was taking part in an experiment in “interactive drama,” but he...

It would have been a safe bet in 1993 to say the text adventure was dead. That year saw the last release of a traditional parser game by a mainstream publisher: Legend Entertainment’s Gateway II: Homeworld, a sequel only greenlit because the original had sold unexpectedly well. But the unlikely success was not repeated. The bestselling games of the year would be CD-ROM extravaganzas like Myst and The Seventh Guest loaded with animations, music, voice acting, and video. Infocom — once the king of...

It was an odd advert for a computer magazine. Next to a sketch of a provocatively posed, long-legged young woman in stockings — okay, maybe that part wasn’t so odd — its copy hyped not a new piece of hardware, but a house in Ireland:

the famous school where grown-up girls are transformed into schoolgirls. …Now you can find out for yourself as you guide Trixie Trinian through the classrooms, corridors and secret places of the strangest school ever — to uncover

THE SECRET OF ST. BRIDE’S

“Not so much ...