48 hours left...
The Kickstarter campaign for the 50 Years of Text Games book has just two days remaining. Close to 4500 backers have now pre-ordered a copy of the book, completely blowing my expectations away. It’s not too late to pledge for your own copy!
Here’s the top five reasons to back, if you’re still on the fence:
Original research. In addition to all fifty entries from the blog series in revised and enhanced forms, there’s 50+ pages of new material including a long introduction about the pre-history of digital text games, surveys of each decade from the 1970s through the 2010s, version and release histories for each game, supplemental sidebars on topics like Infocom’s text adventure language ZIL and the evolution of MUD parsers, a comprehensive index, a full research bibliography for each game, and more.
Maps! The book has a ton of new maps and diagrams created for this project that look gorgeous on a printed page (or your Kindle screen).
Feelies! The Ultimate Collector’s Edition contains a treasure trove of unique pieces of computer gaming history, from a genuine length of 70s paper punch tape to a reproduction of one of the earliest commercially sold adventure games (on cassette tape!) to a hint book with a secret red-lens decoder wand. This version will almost certainly sell out shortly after the campaign ends, so if you want one, grab a copy now.
Support my ongoing work documenting games and creating new ones. The success of this project is giving me some runway to continue bringing cool new projects like 50 Years, Subcutanean, Archives of the Sky, and Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider to life.
Not a fan of Kickstarter or crowdfunding? Once the campaign ends, there will be a BackerKit pre-order store where you can get copies. However, two caveats: at some point soon I’ll need to lock down order quantities to get things rolling with my book printer, at which point quantities of individual editions will become limited; and the pricing may be higher for certain items on the pre-order store. So act quick if you want to take advantage of this option.
Want to help spread the word? Follow the link for a page with material to share and helpful tips to get the word about the book out to your communities.
In case you missed it: some fun links that dropped during the campaign:
I was on the Wizards, Warriors & Words podcast talking with author Jed Herne about the Kickstarter and text games history.
I released a bonus article on Thomas M. Disch’s Amnesia, a curious text game from the 1980s that bucked many trends and conventions.
I wrote a guest post for the Gold Machine blog on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and appeared on the companion Gold Microphone podcast to talk A Mind Forever Voyaging.
I also dropped a sneak peek at the Mind Forever Voyaging chapter from the book, so you can get a sense of what the layout looks like.
Can’t believe we’re almost at the end of this roller coaster (or maybe it’s just the beginning?) Either way, thanks for climbing aboard this ride car with me. Let’s see how many more records we can smash in the last 48 hours!!
—Aaron