Posters and Merch Now Available!

Hi, text game fans! A couple cool announcements:

• There's now a 50 Years of Text Games merch store selling posters, maps, and t-shirts (with some fun new surprises)!

• Further Explorations (the bonus book) will be available for standalone purchase very soon (and I've got pics to prove it)!

Read on for exciting details.

Moichandise!

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.

This is now our shower curtain by the way.

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!

As with all the other maps, this was created with the lovely program DungeonScrawl.

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:

Yes, that does say "Infocom: Lords of Interactive Fiction Tour 1979-1989," followed by a list of absolute bangers.

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.

Further Explorations

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

PS: A Note on Substack

There’s been some controversy for a while now about Substack, the newsletter platform I used for the 50 Years project, and particularly its creators, who seem to be happy letting people publish hateful bullshit on their platform. They certainly have the right to do this, and I also certainly have the right to choose to leave a platform with bad neighbors. Because this newsletter is mostly wound-down, I’ve decided it’s not going to be worth the trouble to migrate this list to another platform right now. But if I do spin it back up or do a similar project going forward, I will be using a different platform. <3