Final 12 months, Aaron A. Reed printed 50 Years of Textual content Video games, an interesting historical past of the form of video games the place it’s important to “get lamp” or “float down the Columbia river”. It lined historic classics like Hunt the Wumpus and The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy by means of to extra fashionable video games doing fascinating issues with letters on a display like Dwarf Fortress and 80 Days. Now he is printed a companion quantity known as Additional Explorations, which covers stuff that needed to be overlooked of the unique—which targeted on one exemplary recreation from annually from 1971 to 2020—however isn’t any much less fascinating.
That features video games you might have heard of like Lovecraftian horror journey Anchorhead, in addition to extra obscure video games, like one with a simulated mannequin of each Manhattan block south of a hundred and tenth. Reed’s simply nearly as good at retelling the story of well-known Infocom classics as he’s at unearthing stuff you’ve by no means heard of like Silverwolf, which was one among eight well-reviewed however now forgotten textual content adventures developed by a studio made up of Irish girls who apparently dressed like cultists from the Victorian period known as St. Bride’s Faculty.
The broader purview of Additional Explorations lets Reed increase his protection into text-adjacent genres like visible novels and hacking simulations, in addition to broader discursions. An evaluation of a recreation primarily based on Stephen King’s brief story The Mist meanders into ideas on the difficulties all videogame diversifications face, whether or not they’re primarily based on Roger Zelazny’s well-loved fantasy novels within the Amber sequence, or one explicit Monty Python sketch about shopping for cheese. (No, actually, it is a recreation known as Cheeseshop.)
Additional Explorations will not be solely with out visuals both, although lots of the video games it covers are—seeing a map of the sci-fi complicated you discover in Planetfall or a flowchart of paths by means of 9 Princes of Amber helps you visualize what would in any other case simply be phrases on a web page. It ends with a timeline of the style that goes all the way in which again to 1760, when the primary interactive novel, Tristram Shandy, was printed. It is exhaustingly full.
Additional Explorations is obtainable on itch.io in epub and pdf codecs, with bodily copies out there from Amazon, and each on DriveThru.