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.)
