GamesAdventureA book about text adventures is the latest essential addition to your videogame history libraryWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesAdventureA book about text adventures is the latest essential addition to your videogame history libraryWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Aaron A. Reed)
Last year, Aaron A. Reed published50 Years of Text Games, a fascinating history of the kind of games where you have to “get lamp” or “float down the Columbia river”. It covered ancient classics like Hunt the Wumpus and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy through to more modern games doing fascinating things with letters on a screen like Dwarf Fortress and 80 Days. Now he’s published a companion volume called Further Explorations, which covers stuff that had to be left out of the original—which focused on one exemplary game from each year from 1971 to 2020—but is no less interesting.
The broader purview of Further Explorations lets Reed expand his coverage into text-adjacent genres like visual novels and hacking simulations, as well as broader discursions. An analysis of a game based on Stephen King’s short story The Mist meanders into thoughts on the difficulties all videogame adaptations face, whether they’re based on Roger Zelazny’s well-loved fantasy novels in the Amber series, or one particular Monty Python sketch about buying cheese. (No, really, it’s a game calledCheeseshop.)
Further Explorations is not entirely without visuals either, though many of the games it covers are—seeing a map of the sci-fi complex you explore in Planetfall or a flowchart of paths through Nine Princes of Amber helps you visualize what would otherwise just be words on a page. It ends with a timeline of the genre that goes all the way back to 1760, when the first interactive novel, Tristram Shandy, was published. It’s exhaustingly complete.
Further Explorations is available onitch.ioin epub and pdf formats, with physical copies available fromAmazon, and both onDriveThru.
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