Huge for the Holidays: Epic Interactive Fiction of the Millennial Period

The Digital Antiquarian A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher Home About Me Ebooks Hall of Fame Table of Contents RSS ← This Week on The Analog Antiquarian Huge for the Holidays: Epic Interactive Fiction of the Millennial Period 19 Dec This article tells part of the story of post-commercial interactive fiction . After fighting the tendency for decades, I’ve finally learned to accept that I’m a bit of a conservative, if not a downright Luddite, when it comes to my interactive fiction — or my text adventures, as I still persist in calling them. Despite its name, parser-based interactive fiction doesn’t actually strike me as all that good at plot-heavy storytelling. What it does excel at is setting. And this is just fine with me. Give me an interesting environment that I can sink my teeth into, filled with puzzles to solve and relations to tease out and exploit, and I’m all over it. Bigger is better here, as far as I’m concerned. I love a text adventure that I can live with for weeks or months, that I can leave open on a separate virtual desktop and let ruminate in the back of my mind while I’m doing other things, popping into it from time to time to try out a brainstorm or add another few rooms to the steadily expanding map of the world that I keep open in another window . Other people use Tetris as a mental palate-cleanser; I use The Mulldoon Legacy . What can I say? As you readers must surely have recognized by now, I’m kind of a weirdo. Unfortunately for me, by the end of the 1990s, the types of text adventures I like best were beginning to fall out of favor with the post-commercial interactive-fiction community. Amidst much excitement over the newly “literary” paths the medium was blazing, a background chorus of atavistic throwbacks just like me bemoaned the dwindling number of new big games. The annual Interactive Fiction Competition , which at that time strongly encouraged its authors to limit themselves to games that could be played to completion in two hours or less, was widely blamed for the drift toward snacks instead of full meals. There is undoubtedly a lot of truth to this, but to that truth must also be added the simple reality that making a big text adventure is hard , and by this point there had long since ceased to be any tangible reward in it beyond the praise and approbation of a small group of diehards. Small wonder that so many people began to opt for shorter games; making even one of those well is more than hard enough. Still, there has always, through all eras, been the occasional crazy person who is ready and willing to make a text adventure that is big and crunchy and unabashedly gamey in that old-school way that is guaranteed to warm this aging Luddite’s heart. There was actually a small cluster of...

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