A definitive book about the first half-century of interactive fiction.
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I'm happy to announce that Further Explorations, the companion volume to 50 Years of Text Games, is finally available for standalone purchase in softcover, hardcover, and digital editions!
Further Explorations is a bit of a grab bag of "cool stuff that couldn't fit into the main book." Here are a few highlights.
Further Explorations began life as a bonus book only available as part of the Collector's Edition of the crowdfunding edition of the book. In the process of getting it ready for standalone sale, I've corrected errata and added significant new material. It's now 85 pages long with 12 chapters, and is a great companion piece if you enjoyed the main book, with plenty new meaty analysis, maps, and datablocks (a chunky list of wordplay-based interactive fiction, anyone?)
Further Explorations is now available as a print-on-demand title from DriveThruFiction and from Amazon, in hardcover and softcover. It's also available in digital form as an EPUB or PDF from Itch.io, DriveThruFiction, and in EPUB from Amazon. And if you're looking for copies of the original 50 Years of Text Games in print, it's available from all these places too.
A couple notes on this release:
I know some of you have been waiting for this for a long time! Thanks for your patience, and I'm happy to finally release the expanded Further Explorations.
In other news if you missed it, there's now a 50 Years merch store that lets you buy some of the maps from the book (and some other fun designs) in a variety of sizes and form factors. Some of the bestselling items are:
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention some of my favorite combinations of design and product that haven't sold any copies at all. Deep in my soul I really want to believe that there's at least one of you out there who desperately needs each of the following:
If you want any of this fine swag, head on over to the 50 Years Merch Store to acquire it.
That's all for now! Take care and as always, happy adventuring,
--Aaron
Hi, text game fans! A couple cool announcements:
Read on for exciting details.
So back during the book's development I had created a bunch of cool maps, and thought it would be neat to finally make some of these designs available on posters, t-shirts, and other products via Redbubble. This has now happened!
Maps are available for 1978's Pirate Adventure, 1979's Choose Your Own Adventure #1: The Cave of Time, 1983's Suspended, 1985's A Mind Forever Voyaging, 1993's Curses, and (a world generated from) 2006's Dwarf Fortress. Even 1982's Planetfall makes an appearance (it's covered in the Further Explorations bonus book... discussed more further down).
While originally designed as posters, I also made tweaked versions of most of these designs to work better on other products Redbubble offers. I ordered some proofs for quality checking and was pretty impressed. Ever wanted CYOA flowchart socks? Or some ASCII world generation as your shower curtain? Now's your chance, folks.
I also decided it would be fun to create an entirely new map to celebrate the store going live. And because I am incapable of not going hard, I picked one of the biggest classic text games maps there is (sigh). So I'm pleased to debut an original map of the 1979 mainframe version of Zork, famously so big it had to be split into three games (the "Zork trilogy") for commercial release on home computers. Look at this glorious mess!
I'm actually giddy at how this turned out. I spent way too much time getting as many fiddly details right as possible, poring over original room description text and trying to make sensible geography out of sometimes rather intertangled, awkward, or even contradictory map connections. Everything is drawn as closely to how it's described in the game as I could make it: "a tiny passage east" is smaller than a "broad hallway," you can see the blood spatters on the wall of the Troll Room, etc etc oh god etc.
(I did punt on the mazes, which are rendered more abstractly to save this cartographer's sanity, and omitted a couple cross-the-map connections; everything else should be game-accurate.)
Finally, while I had Photoshop open, I created a few other fun surprises to round out the store. Ever wanted to wear a listing of the greatest hits of Infocom in the style of a metal band tour shirt? No? Well, you're welcome anyway:
And because I know UK folks are often bummed by how much Infocom hogs the spotlight, I made one for Level 9 too:
So yeah, this has happened! Feel free to visit the Redbubble store which is open now if you'd like to own any of this incredibly geeky swag.
I'm also releasing all of these maps and designs under a Creative Commons license, so you're welcome to grab them to use as wallpapers, reference material, or to print them in even more obscure form factors (please send me pics of your Zork map bowling ball).
One last note on the merch store: Redbubble offers a huge number of products which creators can turn on and off, and I tried to be fairly selective in which I enabled to avoid the store pages being overwhelming. If there's some combination of product and design you want to see that isn't available (if, say, you really need that Level 9 strapless dress) feel free to ping me and I'll be happy to turn the option on for you, if possible-- some products have weird dimensions or requirements so it might not always work out.
In other news, a ton of folks have asked ever since the crowdfunding campaign if this companion volume to 50 Years of Text Games (previously available only in the sold-out slipcase Collector's Edition) would ever be available for standalone purchase. I can say that the answer is now, definitively, "yes"... kind of.
While you won't be able to get the original version of Further Explorations, very soon a revised and expanded edition will be ready for sale! This came about because a 60-page book (the length of the original) was too short for some print-on-demand sites, or too skinny for others to allow printing a title on the spine. The new version adds some extra material written as commissions or bonus articles on the website, bringing the book to just under 90 pages, which feels a bit more substantial as its own standalone volume.
Further Explorations is a great grab-bag of extra material that didn't fit in the main book, from chapters on fan-favorite games like Planetfall and A Dark Room, to pieces on personal favorites of mine like The Gostak, and new material on some fascinating early experiments and interesting failures, like the bookware adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist or the infamously obtuse Amnesia. It also contains short chapters on interesting text game genres not covered in the main book (like hacking sims and wordplay games) and a detailed timeline of interactive fiction history with over 300 items.
Further Explorations 2E is in the proofing stage now and should be available sometime in April via print-on-demand and in PDF/EPUB ebook formats-- I'll announce it here once it's ready. In the meantime, here's some pics from the latest proof (yes, the red pen has come out once again).
(And a quick note: if you already have the original Further Explorations because you were a Collector's Edition backer, you'll get a free EPUB/PDF of the extended edition once it's ready. Stay tuned!)
Thanks for indulging me in giving some of the cool stuff created for the 50 Years project a second life and new places to shine!
Take care,
--Aaron
Hi folks! Hope your year is winding down okay and you're feeling ready for a new one. And that's not a threat, I promise.
A couple quick end of year announcements:
If you have friends who missed the Kickstarter or a need for additional copies, the print-on-demand version of 50 Years of Text Games launched this fall. While this is not as deluxe a printing as the Kickstarter edition, it has identical interior content (besides a few small corrections and updates) so is still a great option for those who want the book in print. The digital version also continues to be available for sale. I wrote more about these editions in a newsletter update here.
Some of you may recall that the Ultimate Collector's Edition came with a floppy disk, which contained the full text of the book in ASCII plus an original game "inspired by all eras of text games history." Ultimate Collector backers have had access to the game since this past summer, but I'm happy to announce I'm releasing it now to the general public. The game is called "You Are Standing" and I'm pretty proud of it. (I wrote more about it here.) The game moves through six parts, emulating different styles of text game from across interactive fiction history. It should be accessible even to folks without much experience playing IF. You can find it on the IFDB here; look for the "Play Online" button in the upper right, and there are also links there to hints if you get stuck.
A cool technical note: "You Are Standing" was written in Inform 6 (which I wrote about in the book in the "Curses" chapter; it was the language designed to compile stories to Infocom's Z-Machine format, built to run Zork). Because the game had to fit into a tiny amount of space remaining on the floppy disk, the whole thing is squeezed into less than 90 kilobytes (which includes all the game's text along with its five different text game engines!). The Z-code format has been around and stable for decades now, which means the game should in theory be runnable even on vintage hardware from the mid-80s on (anything that can load a 90K data file into memory). If you want to experiment, or just run the game on your own system rather than in a web browser, you can download the .z5 file from the IFDB page. You'll need a Z-code interpreter to run the file: a good cross-platform modern one is Lectrote.
A LOT of folks have asked if the bonus book from the Collector's Edition, "Further Explorations," will ever be available for standalone purchase. I can confirm this will be coming sometime in 2024 via print-on-demand. I'll make an announcement here when this is available, details TBD.
I still have two commission articles to write and a few other IF history pieces that might trickle out over the next year. I'll let people know when and where this material will appear-- some of it might end up in the standalone edition of Further Explorations as well as online. I will keep you posted!
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That's it for now. Take care and Happy New Year,
--Aaron
Holy smokes, folks, that was fast! The inventory fire sale went live at 8:00 AM and within four minutes almost all the remaining books were sold out. At 8:08 AM the last available copy of the book anywhere was sold. Apologies to those not quick enough on the draw: I did not anticipate this level of demand!
There are still (as of this writing) a few ancillary items available on the Shopify store: posters and some overstock items from the Ultimate Collector's Edition (including the replica Pirate Adventure cassette tape, the commemorative floppy disk, and empty extras of the bonus box itself). These are going fast so click quickly if you want one.
So yeah, that's a wrap (at last) on the print run of 50 Years of Text Games! 🎉🎉🎉 There are now, sadly, no more copies available except a handful in my private collection. Some options going forward if you're still interested in the book:
* If you still want a print copy, a print-on-demand edition is coming later this year. Stay subscribed (or subscribe) to the project newsletter for news on when this becomes available.
* If you'd like to get the digital edition in PDF, reflowable EPUB, and plain text, it's available on Itch.io.
* If you are a backer who still has an outstanding shipping or payment issue, or never completed your backer survey, please contact me for your options at this point.
I'll post again later in the year to announce the print-on-demand version. In the meantime, I'd love to continue seeing your pics, reactions, and reviews on social media or review sites like GoodReads as you continue absorbing and reacting to the book. Please keep them coming!
Take care,
--Aaron