Zork Thursday

A couple of days ago an unexpected* (*once expected, then forgotten about) parcel arrived for me in my mailslot. I couldn't figure out who it was from or what it was about but I looked forward to finding out. It was from Australia and the Customs declaration said ART BOOK. Excellent, who doesn't need more of that in their life?

Now this is right up my alley! Who is making books about Zork in the year 2025? Why, ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) is! Now a little bell is ringing. Last summer, a long-abandoned e-mail address of mine received a serendipitously-intercepted inquiry about reprinting an image I'd included in a blog post I'd written a dozen years earlier, from the precursor to this very blog here! Back in the day, I'm very confident that there were other copies of this image floating around, to the point where I had to do some sleuthwork to determine whether the scan was even mine (to refresh the reader, the project derived from a campaign on my part to scan, transcribe and annotate all the video game ads from the long boxes of comic books I was liquidating from my basement two homes ago in order to make room for the baby on the way, who is now a lumbering 13-year-old who would probably have enjoyed those comics. In a nutshell: this company didn't tend to advertise its games in comic books. But I also scanned game ads from other sources, so...) But Dead Internet is not just a theory (nearly 40% of websites from just ten years ago are no longer up!), and whatever once was to be found online -- my long-forgotten blog was now the last remaining copy of it at a printable resolution anywhere to be found (well, anywhere easily Googlable at least.)

(In an introductory Stan Persky epistemology class early in my troubled years at Cap College around the turn of the century I wrote an essay making an argument that contrary to Bulgakov's dictate that manuscripts don't burn, knowledge could be destroyed by eradicating everyone and everything that remembered or documented it. The knowledge could then be said to have formerly been known, but not currently known, leaving a pathway for it to be rediscovered and become known once again! I hadn't realised at that time how much of the sum of human knowledge would simply be left to wither away through neglect... but I digress!)

I know, in the year 2025 no one is reading blogs and certainly no one is reading books, but here I am on my blog telling you* (*I know, I already just established that the existence of blog readers today is impossible, but everything about this post is impossible so perhaps I have to re-evaluate the realm of possibility) about how material from one of my mid-twenty-teens blog posts just ended up in a book. I can't get over how this is "blog post: the book: the blog post" for me, I just can't get enough of that closed loop. (What are the odds that this blog post will wind up in print somewhere someday? One must rate the odds as pretty flipping low, but then I would have said that a dozen years also!) In any event, there I am, credited by name in the back along with a handful of originators and heavy-hitting historians of the vintage computing and interactive fiction world, yow! Even were the authors of the articles not so distinguished, the volume is a handsome piece, full of beautiful specimens (including mine!) illustrating the hard-to-believe-it-ever-existed world discussed at great length, that of the early computer games industry. (My only notes are that this specific ad had a rather conspicuous gap baked into it to accommodate a page-break gutter, and ACMI's layout choice could be described as ... failing to harness it effectively.)

To you, they're likely a baffling group of nobodies, but if you ushered me into a room containing Aaron "Blue Lacuna" Reed, Drew "Gold Machine" Cook, Jason "Textfiles" Scott, Nick "Ad Verbum" Montfort, Jimmy "Digital Antiquarian" Maher and Mike "Guitar Hero" Dornbrook, I would have to go full Wayne's World "We're Not Worthy!" on them.

Even though I don't have actual words of mine included in this volume (well, I guess that's what this blog is for! Plenty, one might say even bottomless room to accommodate my words here!) I will be honoured to include the volume on my bookshelf. If anyone else is interested in obtaining a copy, you can do so here. I can see that its price is $25, and also that the cost of shipping it from Australia to Canada more than doubles that cost!

This reminds me that I have art books of my own that are ready to ship out (just last night I was confiding in a creative fellow traveller how this seems like it should be an era for DIY zine production and instead somehow ChatGPT is intercepting that energy and pathologising it) (because surely zine production is a sign of a good healthy psyche, right?), and I should probably get started on it before Christmas mail grinds the system to a ponderous halt. (For that matter, I have text adventure games of my own to write! As a teenager we bashed them out in single afternoons, and now I've spent decades attempting to refine that, er, prima materia. Maybe I should be a little less precious.)

Anyhow, to come full circle -- not to the blog post from a dozen years ago, but to the nearly-50-year-old game the book and the blog post were both documenting... it's a quiet time to be a Zork fan, and we now go literally years and years without any news about our beloved but permanently-quashed innovative franchise of interactive literature. Infocom, Zork's creator (I can't believe I have to spell it out like that, but I can't assume that everyone reading this is up to speed) was bought by Activision back in 1986. Activision was bought by Microsoft in 2023. Today, of all days, Microsoft announced that they were Open Sourcing the source code for the first three games in the Zork Trilogy, which would hypothetically allow people to build, extend, improve and remix the games. (Icing the cake for me is that the source code was shared under the MIT license, since of course MIT is the institution where inspired hackers first designed Zork on a PDP-10 mainframe. I know, I get delight in strange synchronicities: I am a strange fellow.) (In conclusion... nah, that was a fine note to end on. A little abrupt, but indisputable.)

Winning the lottery

Garage sale season is upon us and I'm haunted by memories of happy hunting in yesteryear where today I come up totally empty.  In a story I've doubtlessly recounted here many times, growing up garage sales were never a thing for me and my family... but when I met my wife I was sucked into their world of endless entertainment by touring outlets of secondhand goods, from garage sales to thrift stores to swap meets and flea markets.  Coming along for the ride, I had to spontaneously come up with a category of consumer goods to keep an eye open for just in case we stumbled across some, and naturally I gravitated to old video games.

Now it is not only garage sale season but the season of coordinated neighbourhood sales, where you can drive to a part of town and be assured of dozens of nearby sales offering their goods.  Neighbourhood sales we've visited year on year and have beloved memories of!  There are some eternal constants: always lots of women's clothing and children's clothing, none of it of interest to me... but the games are good, right?  It's been a couple months of garage sale season and I've gotta say by and large it seems that people are no longer selling video games at garage sales!  I might visit two dozen sales on a sunny Saturday and return home with just a handful of brain-stimulating Nintendo DS carts for seniors or a couple of PS4 sports titles, thin soup!  It stings when I have memories of visiting the same neighbourhood sales a decade ago and coming home with a complete Sega Dreamcast or a boxed VIC-20 for $10.

It's a weird thing returning to the same places across the years and ... well, some things change and some things don't.  (I remember seeing an NES on a thrift shop shelf for $100, outshining an entire cohort of unwanted $10 GameCubes... I used to visit Value Village basements to assemble NES and Sega Genesis units one component at a time!  It doesn't matter how many times I return to those stores, their shelves will never again boast those particular dispositions of goods.)  Back In The Day I think there was a greater likelihood of parents emptying the attic and liquidating their college-bound children's video game collections for pennies just to get the space back, whereas possibly with inflation games are now so expensive to buy and bizarrely retain their value so much better (especially Nintendo games, see below) that the buyers are more sensitive to recouping as much of their initial cost outlay as possible, ideally on Facebook Marketplace, priced according to recent eBay listings.  (Sometimes you do see these kinds of games cluelessly being sold at garage sales also, but ... you only achieve eBay sale prices by selling to the global pool of potential buyers, not the few dozen randos who stop by your garage sale.  Even on eBay, the buyers are only pocketing a portion of the revenues, the house takes a large cut and you're paying for shipping.  But don't get me started!)

Back to that Nintendo piece -- back when the Wii came out, my wife was briefly interested in exploring the exercise possibilities of Wii Fit and its Balance Board, but blanched with sticker shock.  As the PlayStation 3 had also recently hit the market, I was able to convince her that we could also enjoy substantial calorie-burning enjoyment along with profound pocketbook savings by instead buying a soon-to-be-discontinued PlayStation 2, a couple of dance mats and a DDR disc.  (We picked up two other games at steep fire-sale discounts, the all-time classic Shadow of the Colossus and the delightfully bizarre underdog Chulip.)  There were genuinely great savings to be had as one popular platform was eclipsed by its successor and was shown out the door with a celebration of sorts, inviting folks who had missed its entire commercial lifespan to take part at last for a hugely reduced ticket price.  (That PS2, which of course also played PS1 games, was an incredible investment, and over the years my collection of abundant and affordable (basically $5 or less) secondhand games for it has burgeoned to over 600.  They're not all winners, but how good does a game have to be to be worth at least $5?)

Compare and contrast: we came to the Nintendo Switch party years late, and its replacement the Switch 2 just having dropped, we thought we might fill in some gaps in my kids' Switch game collection for their birthdays.  My kids have enjoyed TOTK and Mario Kart 8 and Kirby & the Forgotten Land, Fae Farm, the untitled Goose game and Little Kitty, Big City... and logged many, many hours sucking the marrow out of Animal Crossing: New Horizons... but the killer app for any Nintendo console is its first-party Mario game, and we never yet got around to acquiring a copy of Super Mario Odyssey.  The game is now what, seven-odd years old, and we've reached the end of the line for its native platform, so surely we can pick it up for a song now as we eventually did with Super Mario Galaxy, right?  Buying it from a store today basically costs as much as it did eight years ago when it was brand new.  Maybe we can get a deal buying it digitally from the Nintendo e-storefront?  No, this old game long since paid off is still being sold at full price even though we give them a break on the costs of printing, packaging and shipping the media!  Surely we can get it on the cheap secondhand on Facebook Marketplace?  Stop me if you've heard this one before... It seems that my frugal collector's mantra of "don't collect for a system until the games become cheap" over the past couple of generations is now somehow translating to "don't collect games for Nintendo systems, they never become cheap."  We haven't quite yet arrived at the future where you don't buy games, only nontransferable licenses to play them -- but I am expecting its arrival every day, which will really bring this hobby of video game collecting to an ignominious end...

... which, somehow, brings us to the jaw-dropping photograph this blog post opens with.  Because I never actively began collecting console games until I very belatedly entered the "gainful employment and regular income" part of my life, basically by the time I had started the window had already closed on the likelihood of stumbling across any that I might have had childhood nostalgia for.  (Granted, as I never owned a console as a child, even this nostalgia is kind of false valour -- but I am able to resonate with kinship for generations of technology contemporary to my youth whether I got to experience them in their temporal context or otherwise.  After all, I saw them at friends' houses, I heard classmates exchanging tips on beating them in the schoolyard, and I saw the ads on TV.)  As I was travelling to the neighbourhood garage sale, an old friend was announcing it online, specifically noting to me that he had stumbled across some long-forgotten treasures in a dusty crawlspace while scouring his home for surplus housewares to sell.  Hilariously, my rounds brought me to his yard sale before the message ever had a chance to reach me.  Presented with his offerings, I gulped and concluded that basically I was going to have to pay him whatever he was asking, since some of these games are basically unobtainable without taking out a loan.

That guy!  He just wanted to be assured that these games would be appreciated and cherished, not crassly flipped for profit or more vulgarly tossed in the trash and consigned to the Atari E.T. graveyard.  Well, I can't make any promises about the Super Scope cart whose peripheral I am not in possession of, but between me, my kids and my annual vintage gaming parties, those top-tier JRPGs will absolutely be put through their paces and, basically, we will be making up for lost time with them.  (The Star Control 2 box is empty, but I can fill it with all my memories of playing the best computer game ever made!)  

In conclusion, it looks like I don't have to go to any more garage sales this summer, because I'm definitely not going to stumble across any further lots anywhere near remotely as amazing as this one!  (Heck, I'm only ever going to be seeing lots like this again by visiting estate sales of deceased collectors!)

Christmas 2024 - the evolution of vintage

I hope you all had a jolly holiday season and a happy new year, and once again we're back with me scratching my head and pondering some of my delightful and perplexing new/old technological goods received from my friends and loved ones (and, OK, let's be fair, sometimes I just buy them for myself when I see them for a good price.)

That's a fun haul from my family for Christmas!  Big items, little items, some to play, some to wear, some to hang as decor... let's dig into it a little more:

One thing for sure, this was the Christmas of Zelda.  At my latest Vintage Video Games Party in November, a recurring get-together over the past decade that has gradually morphed from a gathering of my own nostalgic peers and colleagues to one of my children's social circle, experiencing gaming history for the first time (... and their fathers, who somehow won the playdate chaperone lottery), we had a lot of diverse offerings available, but despite all the Pokemon and Katamari and Sonic and Mario and Pac-Man we demonstrated on all the different systems, all of the Nintendo machines (of which there are many) kept somehow gravitating back to Legend of Zelda titles from different generations.  It was the first time so many machines had experienced such a clean sweep from a single series.  And now it came home to me -- it is very, very extraordinary for us to be have games for a current-generation system (granted, only at a couple points in my life have I been in possession of a current-generation system, whose games you could just go to a regular shop and buy) (and granted, the Switch is kind of at the end of its lifespan, but it still has a lot of life left in it!) and in addition to the amazing Goose game I've been waiting years for a chance to get acquainted with and the post-apocalyptic Kirby game (a phrase that perhaps no one imagined would ever be written) here we're looking at two new Zelda titles, a Zelda Amiibo (a phenomenon that has hitherto only existed for me as a kind of abstract hypothetical) and, not pictured, another Zelda game delivered digitally.  My daughters absolutely had to have "the Zelda game where you finally get to play as Zelda" (well, it's about time), and Tears of the Kingdom, the digital purchase, is by all accounts a must-play.  I've only had the opportunity to put about a half-hour into the Goose game and haven't had a chance to even touch the other games, but it's very nice to have the option of playing them!  You will grow old and die waiting for used Nintendo games to lose enough value to become inexpensive secondhand pickups.  But wait, there's more!

Did somebody say "floppies"?  (No, nobody said "floppies".  Why would somebody say "floppies"?)  I remember when Risky Woods came out and had a demo circulating local BBSes from our friendly neighbourhood software corporation Electronic Arts whose campus I now drive past taking my daughter to school.  Megapede I know nothing about, but I guess I have what I need to get up to speed!  I love this flexible packaging style that would accommodate both of the major formats of floppy diskettes at that time, these 3.5 inch ones or the 5.25 ones you see below.  (And if I'm not happy with how well the packaging protects the media, now it seems I have several little diskette tupperware containers to shield them with!)

Well, isn't this a potentially fun stash!  I am not in possession of a any equipment that would have any chance of being able to successfully read them, but it certainly makes my nostalgia Spidey sense tingle!  Some of the earliest programs I have memories of running on our early PC were on this format of floppy -- Maniac Mansion, Hack, Deathtrack, the copy of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game that my Grade 6 teacher pirated for me... and of course we were saving our course work in the Kerrisdale C64 lab on these kinds of disks.  I see here three disks of system software for an Atari 8-bit computer, plus course work for a 1984 Grade 11 computer science class saved to the Apple II format... I love the Wizard Computers branding for a local computer shop, and of course that disk and the ones above it clearly contain games games games!  So I will definitely need to do some kind of research needed to enable myself to experience the gaming glory of (checks notes) States & Capitols. 

My youngest daughter has taken a fancy to dancing games in the wake of her dad's DDR period 25 years ago, so I make an effort to pick those up whenever I see them secondhand even though it's not always clear what the common mechanism is for registering successful dance moves across so many different platforms!  These PS3 games are kind of filler but you know, all of the Traveller's Tale Lego games are solid, especially for family co-op play.  All I know about Boss Monster is that a) they nailed the NES Black Box art aesthetic and b) I have seen a suspicious number of sets for sale second-hand, leading me to believe... if the game is all that fun, why aren't its owners hanging on to it?  (But then that logic doesn't apply to Lego Batman, so maybe I am just being too picky.) 

It's a ... pillowcase?  This kind of stuff... well, I wrote one of the most popular posts on the past incarnation of this blog on that topic, they're called "realia" -- materials about games and gaming that aren't themselves games.  They're wonderful and terrible all at once, clearly I need more so I can wreck my life!

This has somehow fallen through a time hole from my Grade 4 school C64 computer lab into my home.  I should get it posted up immediately, how is it even possible my kids haven't already destroyed my machines without these ground rules clearly laying down the law?  

Here's the ordering information if you want to try to find a copy for yourself, but I can report that its website redirects to another business that, I imagine, ate the old one.  A pity, no home computer lab is complete without both this and a companion piece I just learned about!

I've been so immersed in old-computer-world headspace for the past 30 years I didn't think there was anything new under the sun, but here's something I'd never even imagined before -- a festive Christmas wreath fashioned from curly bundles of the little tractor-feed edges of dot matrix computer paper!  A pity it's so seasonal or I'd be tempted to hang it year-round!

Now that's it for the gifts but as around the holiday season I'm often passing through places where secondhand goods of interest to me are being sold while looking for secondhand goods of interest to others, I found some pickups I could use to wish myself a merry Christmas with:

To imagine all this time that my unboxed SNES cartridges have just been floating around loose... surely they (well, two of them) will be safer in these plastic sheathes, vouched for by the official Nintendo seal of quality!

When you think you've gotten to the end of your system's capabilities, why not expand them with some accessories and peripherals?  Yes, I want to sing into my Wii.  Yes, I absolutely want to play Dance Dance Revolution on my Wii... my fancy was caught by the series in the arcades when they were new, and since then I have acquired DDR games for all kinds of platforms but only ever been in possession of dance mats for the PlayStation 2 (which we bought, new, with the console in like its last week as an officially supported product, as a fitness aid, after my wife looked at the cost of a Wii Fit system with balance board ... speaking of which, I should put this fitness regimen to work at last!) which is good for the PS1/PS2 era DDR games, but leaves the rest of them only playable with joysticks, which really is a very different kind of experience.  Ah, and a PS2 remote control!  I always knew it could play DVDs, but I didn't realise it had a streamlined controller to emphasize that use.  (Now, what is it like playing regular PS2 games on the remote?)  I'm really not sure what the USB to HDMI adaptor is for but I look forward to finding out.

Yeah, it's a random assortment but it'll do: Conan is always a good time, Table Tennis gave us one of the greatest mouthfuls in video game history, Rogue Warrior is kind of "The Room" of video games, and I've already enjoyed a couple of hours with Portal 2... even luring my wife in with the voice casting of Stephen Merchant!  All that plus the Street Fighter spin-off movie about Chun-Li, in support of my aspirations to someday host a video game film festival, surely among the world's worst.

 

Can you believe that some people have a net zero video game philosophy, and clear out the old ones as new ones come in?  An old friend posted these up for grabs (and others, but they were grabbed) and, as I remarked, I would be honoured to play their old games on the old systems I inherited from them years ago.  Katamari is ageless!  Kirby?  That's gold!  And the rest of them?  Well... always glad to have.  Thank you very much!

Finally, one more random garage sale find.  How can you say no to him?  The Chessmaster is played by actor Will Hare, who died in 1997.  Chilling!  But he can still kick your ass at chess from beyond the grave.

Thanks for joining for another anachronistic blog post, likely see you again this time next year!