Welcome! The games are released! Here is everything you need to know for getting the 2012 Hugo MiniComp games.

UPDATE! What the %!$# is this but more games? See below for the two other additions!

Hugo is a language you can use to make text adventures. Hugo games work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You just need to get the right interpreter. We are recommending the interpreter Hugor to play Hugo games. If you don’t have a Hugo interpreter, just click that link to download one for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X!

Here are the games for the Hugo MiniComp. Click each title to download the games individually.

Party Arty, Man of La Munchies by Jonathan Blask
World Builder by Paul Lee
The Hugo Clock by Jason McWright
Spinning by Rob O’Hara
Tales of a Clockwork Boy by Marius Müller
Retro-Nemesis by Robb Sherwin

And a game called Teleporter Test by Paul Robinson that introduces teleportation to Hugo players everywhere! Screw you, Cardinal Directions!

Perhaps you are on Windows and would like the Hugor interpreter and all the games packaged together? Download this.

If you’d like to make your own games in Hugo, there is a forum on Jolt Country where Hugonauts will be happy to answer questions and provide help. There is also a wiki called Hugo by Example that has lots of examples of Hugo code.

If you enjoyed these Hugo games and would like to play more, the Interactive Fiction Database is a great place to look. Click here for all listed Hugo games.

Thanks for playing the games!

Each day when I come into work, I am greeted by a widescreen monitor that shows how many failed regression tests exist in the program we sell. Over the last two and a half years I created thousands of tests. I feel pride and ownership in them, which is unsettling to me, because this is supposed to be my job, and not my passion or anything, right?

We hired a guy six months ago who quit last week. He was – still is! – a brilliant automation engineer. He left the tests I made in better shape than when he started. He created dozens of new tests and I would work with him again in an instant. But there was a reptilian part of my brain that wouldn’t shut its goddamn mouth every time he made something new. It objected to the very concept of stuff I didn’t myself make. This stunned me. It bugged me. I couldn’t put my finger on any of it until I read Machine Man by Max Barry. That feeling, and many others that you experience in an engineering job, are deftly captured by Max Barry here.

Machine Man is written in the first-person and gives us an often painfully accurate voyage in the mind of a brilliant and successful autistic nerd that nobody would want to spend any time with outside of work. And even that is probably pushing it, Christ. Dr. Charles Neumann (our protagonist) loses his leg in an industrial accident and figures out pretty quickly that the prosthetic industry is a bit shit. He’s inspired to develop a kind of leg that will make him bigger, stronger, faster than before. What Barry does throughout the entire book is capture the inspiration that can consume a dork when all distractions have ceased, and you can truly focus. We (apparently I will selfishly align with Dr. Neumann when it serves my purposes) understand that being in the uncanny valley creeps everyone out. Mimicking human behavior is thrown out for all manner of robotic improvement.

It’s funny without picking on autistic people, which they pretty much deserve for ruining the Wikipedia, so credit Barry there. I can’t articulate why I am able to finish his novels in a night or two, but I got into the same vibe that I had with his books Jennifer Government and Company.

There is a kind of character that Barry does extremely well. (Dr. Neumann is characterized perfectly, and I don’t remember anything like him in one of Barry’s previous works.) The character of Cassandra Cautery is an intelligent, capable woman who gets in over her head, and I was reminded of a similar gal from his previous novel, Company. (I’m going to be honest: I can’t remember her name, but she was the woman who was obsessed with working out.) (OK, I got out my hardback of Company, and her name was Holly Vale.) Everything Cassandra said felt genuine, even though most of it was horrible, because I find myself listening to car insurance ads on the radio during my commute home, and somebody without a soul is churning those out.

What’s really stopping Machine Man from being brilliant instead of just really good is that there are many other characters that don’t feel as well-developed. I thought that the character of Lola Shanks felt less fleshed-out, because we were getting to know her exclusively through the tortured prism of Dr. Neumann, who is not all that great with women. I can’t decide if, therefore, it’s pretty cool that she was filtered that way or what. Regardless, I remembered that I became slightly attracted to the woman who did my rehab when I tore up my knee many years ago, even though I swore I wouldn’t let myself be, because I knew it was extremely cliched. C’mon son. So this is another thing that felt right about Machine Man to me. I can’t completely dismiss the nagging feeling that when Barry spends as much time with his characters as he does with his (quite fun) plots, he’s going to blow up the world.

With that in mind, the ending made my skin crawl. A couple pages that were just brilliantly written, where I was, like, scratching myself to remind my own brain that I’ve got my body and didn’t lose it or abandon it. I felt sick when reading it. In the good way. Kicking the covers so I could see my own legs, I felt ill while reading text on a page, which is some of the highest praise I can give a novel. I don’t want to give anything away, but I think the last two pages of Machine Man make an argument that its genre is horror instead of sci-fi. That’s a trick I don’t think I’ve ever seen before and wish I’d thought of myself.

Welcome to the upcoming Hugo MiniComp! What is Hugo? Hugo is a language by Kent Tessman for creating text-based video games.

Roody Yogurt had this to say in the original announcement of the comp:

2011 saw the Hugo release of Robb Sherwin’s Cryptozookeeper, one of the largest multimedia-enhanced IF games ever. That alone makes it a good year for Hugo, as we Hugo users are few. A handful of us thought we’d end the year on a good note and challenge ourselves to a SpeedIF. Schedule-fitting and unexpected interest from some non-Hugo-savvy authors have turned that idea into an altogether different thing, though.

Now, we christen that thing, “The Hugo ‘Open House’ Competition.” The rules:

- Games can be any size and can even be a work already in progress.
- Games are due the morning of December 31st. The entrant is then free to (and somewhat expected to) celebrate the transition into the new year heartily.
- Waiting until the last week (or day) even and writing a classic-SpeedIF-sized game is viable (we made the coding-time intentionally vague so newcomers can as much time as they want acquainting themselves).
- Links to games can either be posted here or at the joltcountry forum. If you don’t have any place to upload your game, e-mail your entry to roodyyogurt at gmail.

Games will not be ranked. There will not be prizes other than acceptance into a small yet tightknit group of IF enthusiasts.

People new to Hugo may want to look at Hugo by Example’s “Getting Started” page.

Questions about Hugo coding can, of course, be answered on this forum in the “Other Development Systems” base or at the Hugo base at joltcountry.com.

Good luck!

I know one game is finished and I am going to try to finish mine tomorrow. We’re going to have the games available by December 31st. Won’t you join us?

pinback: I am watching a professional match and do not understand it.
pinback: Looks like a buncha fuckin’ nerds.
Ice Cream Jonsey: Who are these fucks?
pinback: Koreans, probably.

Ice Cream Jonsey: I heard that the best player in the world of DOTA, his girlfriend is Ms South Cleveland.

pinback: Apparently it’s a five-on-five team game, with each player controlling one “man” who can gain “levels” and “skills”.
pinback: It was the most popular WC3 mod, apparently, and now both Valve and Blizzard’s biggest upcoming releases are “DOTA 2″. They’re each making one.
pinback: It’s the biggest thing in gaming today.
pinback: Is what I hear.

Ice Cream Jonsey: I don’t like any games any more that are supposed to be “big.”
pinback: It’s BIG. Everyone’s playing it, Robb.
Ice Cream Jonsey: I don’t like Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends, Call of Duty or Gears of War.
Ice Cream Jonsey: I wish I could narrow down what those four games have in common.
pinback: I SENSE A THEME.

pinback: I don’t understand DOTA though. And these broadcasters might as well be speaking, I dunno… some sort of… what, alien language? Or something?
pinback: Man, I don’t get any of this.
Ice Cream Jonsey: I can help. I made a reference that only YOU would get in another place. Would you like to see it?
pinback: Yes.
Ice Cream Jonsey: http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3787&start=40#p27486
Ice Cream Jonsey: You are the only person who will get the reference.

pinback: heeh eheh kekeke and the plagooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Ice Cream Jonsey: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Ice Cream Jonsey: Aw man. I wish customized jerseys were cheaper.
Ice Cream Jonsey: Because I would get a Saints #22 PLAGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
pinback: HAHahahahah
Ice Cream Jonsey: (Until they ran out of letters.)
Ice Cream Jonsey: I would hope that the Os would flip around to the front.

pinback: I always wanted to get a #79 Avs jersey with the name “PHO”.
pinback: THen I would go into Pho #79 and demand free soup.
Ice Cream Jonsey: (turns around, points thumbs at back of jersey) EHHHHH???

Ice Cream Jonsey: If either one of us ever makes more than $300,000 then that will be our pact. We get us both our customized jerseys.
pinback: PACT

You can download lots of free ambient and electronica tracks from FWONK*. For instance, I recommend:

Imploded View: An Exploded View
I Have a Box: Bunnies
Bachelor Machines: Fatal Error
Per: Ettertid

Should be another interview coming shortly, and I’ll update the site when that happens. A few other things:

Kickstarter, more like KICK ASS STARTER! Jason Scott hit $118,000 to fund three future documentaries. I assume they will be documentaries. I’m trying to elbow my way in to make TAPE a movie about one man’s timeless tale of courage and self-sacrifice as he discusses life with a giant tapeworm. I picture our protagonist grabbing a random on-looker and shouting the tale at him, Rime of the Ancient Mariner-style. The entire special effects budget will be used for when the tapeworm switches hosts at the end. Gross!

Jimmy Maher ported The King of Shreds and Patches to the Amazon Kindle. It plays pretty nicely. It’s a little slow to update the screen after you type a command, and the Kindle’s keyboard is pants, but having a small tablet play IF is sooooooo nice.

zarf and Jason Shiga just released Meanwhile for iOS devices. I read a little of this at Boston PAX, and as a hard copy, it captured the attention of everyone who picked it up. My iPhone has a splintered, slightly shattered screen, so everything I play on it comes off looking like the tortured software of a spurned lover. That won’t stop me from making Meanwhile the fairest of them all, as soon as I can remember which PC I left iTunes on.

Our very own Jon Blask has been reviewing interactive fiction in the JC forum. He revived it from a few years ago, and the thread starts to get hopping on page 2.

Lastly, Rob O’Hara released HANGAR 22 a little while ago, and I don’t think it got the attention it deserves. It is a fun little romp, maybe an hour’s worth of gameplay. Rob is a great, witty writer. Play it on-line here.

The MVP, in my opinion, is Jose Bautista, but let’s get in the minds of the voters. None of these guys are on steroids, but voting is going to come down to who is doing the most fake steroids. Therefore, to baseball writers:

4. Jacoby Ellsbury. There is not a shred of proof that he is on PEDs. But during their championship run, everyone else on the Sox were injecting themselves with any fluid they could find. So that means it’s the culture there, and Jacoby should pay for writers not seeing it earlier.
Odds Of Steroid Use: 1,000,000%, 4th place.

3. Jose Bautista: You just gotta at least ask the question! It was also proven by ESPN.com that a mysterious “man in white” was able to fire darts filled to bursting with steroids into Jose’s neck during play last year after certain pitches were released from the pitcher’s hands. Clearly on steroids, but most writers aren’t sure if they are legal in Canada or not, so he may get some slight benefit.
Odds of Steroid Use: 4,000%, 3rd place.

2. Curtis Granderson. They can’t punish A-Rod for his steroid use here, but what we saw with Bagwell being denied is that a different guy on the same team is good enough. (Bagwell the one being punished for Ken Caminiti.) Sorry, Curtis.
Odds of Steroid Use: 1,000%, 2nd Place

1. Justin Verlander. Nobody cares about steroid use on a team that lost 170 games in a season like the Tigers did a few years back. Could be punished for Miguel Cabrera’s behavior, but 1) Cabrera will be punished in this vote for Cabrera, and 2) Scotch? NOT A STEROID. 25 wins is a big middle finger to last year’s AL CY vote and, don’t ask the voters how, Moneyball as written by Billy Beane.
Odds of Steroids Use: 0%, 1st Place

Ice Cream Jonsey: Did I tell you the Tale of Tommy John?
Pinback: no
Pinback: he had a surgery
Ice Cream Jonsey: He did have a surgery.
Ice Cream Jonsey: There’s a list.
Ice Cream Jonsey: There’s a list of people who had “Tommy John Surgery.”
Pinback: TJS list.
Pinback: STRASBURG
Ice Cream Jonsey: Do you see this?
Ice Cream Jonsey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_John_Surgery#List_of_notable_baseball_players_having_received_the_surgery
Ice Cream Jonsey: Do you see the [1] next to Tommy John’s name in that list?
Pinback: I do.
Ice Cream Jonsey: Do you know why that is there?
Ice Cream Jonsey: I will tell you.
Pinback: Why??
Ice Cream Jonsey: Because when Strasburg fucked up his arm, I edited that page and put a [citation needed] next to Tommy John’s name in that list.
Ice Cream Jonsey: And sure enough
Ice Cream Jonsey: Sure enough
Pinback: HAHAhaha
Ice Cream Jonsey: Some Wikipedian Aspergerian did so.
Pinback: AHAHAAHAhahah
Pinback: ahhah
Pinback: ha
Pinback: FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO LOOKED LIKE HITLER: HITLER [citation needed]
Ice Cream Jonsey: It’s just one of those things I’ve never told anyone. But I wanted you to know.

I enjoy voting. But like most Americans, I hate leaving the house, so I just use an absentee ballot. I have accepted the fact that my votes will just be thrown into a garbage heap of tires and inexplicably bruised organic bananas because 99% of absentee voters are in the military and vote the opposite of how I do. But when I figured out I didn’t have to drive to vote for Victor’s experiment and that Mike Snyder spambans anyone from registering on intfiction.org with a .mil address, it became extremely appealing.

I have been out of the loop as a player for a few years, so this list will look like it was written in mid-2006. (For instance, George Bush invades someone between picks 13 and 14.) I wasn’t going to post it because it’s unfair to all the authors making great games in the current day. The world probably doesn’t need another multi-Zork list. I’m currently playing Savoir-Faire, so I am so far behind the times, I might as well be playing games from the actual 18th French Century. I don’t want to discourage anyone doing new things, but this happens anytime there’s an IF list — the last few years of text games are almost completely ignored. But while players are behind, word does eventually get out.

1. Zork I: The Great Underground Empire by Infocom. The first truly great video game that was ever created.

2. Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz by Infocom. To this day there’s, what, fewer than a dozen video game sequels that were legitimately as good as the first one?

3. Knight Orc by Level 9. They ended up making a MMORPG with characters taking the place of logged-in users. Virtually everyone is reprehensible, there’s a ton of emergent gameplay and it really does feel like you got dumped into an unfriendly world, left with only your wits. This sense of community should be what on-line roleplaying games are trying to achieve, instead of bitcoin-based libertarianism and goblin-slobbing.

4. I-0 by Adam Cadre. Laugh-out-loud funny, with that sense of being able to go anywhere and do anything that I really love in IF.

5. Jinxter by Magnetic Scrolls. I only played this game after Michael Bywater made in appearance in the comments of that forum post where Andy Baio published internal Infocom e-mails without asking anyone if that was OK. This really is one of the funniest games ever made. The author’s challenge in Jinxter seemed to be to give a payoff for every single response the parser gave the player. (I’ve never written a proper review, so excuse me going into depth here.) When I was mid-way through the last game I made, I’ll confess that having to come up with so much text for mundane items was starting to become a chore. How many ways can a man describe a desk? Then I played Jinxter. Jinxter was like one of those personal trainers who yell at you. It made me realize what a gift it is to have the attention of a player. What an *opportunity*. It made me comprehend the rare series of events that need to occur for someone to even begin playing one’s text game in this age and if I didn’t respect that, and attempt to make every line of text as good as I could, I should just give up. Bywater doesn’t give up anywhere in Jinxter. He’s a force of nature here.

(But it’s below I-0 because no hawt chix go topless.)

6. Narcolepsy by Adam Cadre. Full review here.

7. Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin. Loved how smart I felt when I got inside the building, and the jarring shift that happens next. I never got tired of having the interrogator tell me that I couldn’t have possibly done what I did, seeing how what I did resulted in me squicking out. That — along with V.A.T.S. in Fallout 3 and take-downs in Deus Ex: Human Revolution — is one of those unique mechanics that I never ended up getting tired of.

8. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls by Legend. A wise man once pointed out to me that after A Mind Forever Voyaging, an artistic triumph that fared poorly financially, Steve Mertezky did "sex game, then sequel." Sure, but after those two games he came up with what I believe is the most entertaining game of his career. S101 was meticulously plotted with a master of his craft leveraging his years of experience for a great story as well as game. There is a certain pleasure to someone experienced kicking ass in their creative years with such confidence. But at the same time, there was a lot of room for exploration within the game’s college campus. You could chose whether or not you went to class or not, and it was better to actually go! Amazing. S101 also holds the distinction of being the only game whose walkthrough of commands has ever made me laugh.

9. Fail-Safe by Jon Ingold. I’ve read some other reviews that indicate that other players had a difficult time navigating things, but this didn’t happen in my case. I’m awful at seeing the trick in movies, books and games, so my brain was perfectly pudgy and ululating to be so magnificently tricked by a game like Fail-Safe.

10. The Circuit’s Edge by Westwood Associates. I used to say this was my favorite book done by my favorite video game company. Then I got older and understood that the Infocom label was being used, though nobody at Infocom proper worked on it. The chief gameplay mechanic of this is just so amazingly brilliant: you can add microchips to your brain and instantly have a new personality or new abilities. This is dead-set sexy for video games. Like, argh, THIS should have been the genre that took over the world, and shooting people in the face with WWII weapons while having the word "of" in the title should have been marginalized. Fantastic soundtrack, graphics that don’t look too dated, random combat you can control to some degree via the microchip thing and the writing of (or in the style of) George Alec Effinger.

NOTE: One of the worst moments of my life was when I was carrying a lot more weight than I am now, and I went into Circuit’s Edge and accidentally had the player character eat too much food in one of the shoppes. This game flat-out tells you that you feel "grossly full" and, Christ – it was one of those "self" moments where you feel sick. Both Marid Audran and me made some lifestyle changes, although his involved a lot more bareback prostitute-fucking.

11. Photopia by Adam Cadre. I don’t have anything special to add, but here’s the reason why Adam is my favorite IF author: he has this way of either anticipating what players are going to type, thus making the parser seemless, like how Richard Bartle describes YOUR dragon in Get Lamp, or else he hypnotizes me by writing so well that I don’t try to get cute and awkwardly type stuff, struggling to make things work. I’ll play in a single setting any IF that manages to make the parser something I barely have to pay attention to.

12. Savoir-Faire by Emily Short. I am still playing this, but the humor and magic system really compliment each other. I feel the same way about most games with magic as people today feel about zombie games: there’s too many, and they suck right in their very reason for being. SF is an exception, like, say, Left 4 Dead 2. But really, the whole illusion with text games is that you can type anything into that prompt. So I like how Savoir-Faire, through the linking of objects, now has everything in play as a possible object that can pay off later. That, to me, is better world-building than a magic system where you find spell books or gain them via levels.

13. Suspended by Infocom. More for the amazing interface and unique way of looking at Interactive Fiction. Truly set up like a game more than anything else, and I think there was even points, in the form of human lives lost, in the game? I don’t remember exactly, but in my defense, I figured the bots were remembering everything for me. Features one of the few player characters I feel I could beat up.

14. Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country by One of the Bruces. My appreciation of this one is similar to Mentula Macanus, but I got more of the references in this one. I think I reviewed it on Trotting Krips back in the day. I think the only video game designer in the world whose games I’ve completely finished is Bruce. The moral of the story is: to be a successful author, develop an atmosphere where people feel that if they don’t finish your work, they’ll wind up with a mishmash of weird genitals sent through the post.

15. A Mind Forever Voyaging by Infocom. There is one thing I really like about this game: Mertezky wanted to write a game because he hated Reagan, and that’s great. More text games need to tell me who they’re pissed off at. Another guy at Infocom, and I want to say it was Lebling, was like, "That’s fine, as long as there’s nobody stopping me from doing a pro-Republican game in the future." (Paraphrased.) I mention this only because in our current political climate, everyone involved in such an exchange at almost any place of employment would be dead via the in-fighting, and that re-includes Reagan.

16. Guilty Bastards by Kent Tessman. I liked this when I originally played it, because I was trapped in the mind of Kent Tessman, who is wry, clever, witty and fun. I then savaged this game’s source as I tried to make things work in my Hugo games, and gained a greater appreciation for it and all the stuff I missed. It was very inspirational – I learned it was OK if you have stuff in a game that all players don’t see. Some people will, and those people will appreciate it.

17. Guild of Thieves by Magnetic Scrolls. I like to think this is what Zork IV would have been like, if Zork IV didn’t become Enchanter and was instead developed 15 years later. Funny, hates the player, gives you an entire world to solve puzzles in and has stunning graphics. Flack and I showed this one on the Amiga during the Oklahoma Video Game Expo, and some frigging reprobate had the unmitigated audacity to write, ">this game sucks" when we weren’t looking. Whoever that person was: YOU suck.

18. At Wit’s End by Mike Sousa. I used to like that, with everything that happens in this game, the Red Sox winning the World Series was still the least believable. Then they won twice and took to scoring like 25 runs a game against the Blue Jays. Therefore this is downgraded to #18 to signify the 18 years since the Jays have last been to the playoffs.

19. Rameses by Stephen Bond. Having a text game that basically doesn’t let you change anything is such a good idea — but it also didn’t occur to me what was going on until I finished playing it and went "HEY, WHAT THE." This is because I am very stupid. But this game takes an enormous chance by giving us a charismatic player character that we have no real reason to care for. It’s that level of guts that made me adore the game so much.

20. Annoyotron by Ben Parrish. Because, well. OK. It’s here because I can type several thousand words about the best genre in the world and it doesn’t change that, to the rest of the populace, they imagine these games we love so much to be exactly like this one.

Jack was a teenaged kid when he originally found my dial-up BBS (still called Jolt Country) in Rochester. There was a main “gang” of posters at that point (me, Da King, Jethro Q. Walrustitty, The REAL Man, Aardvark, Freemesser, Bunky, Oh-Niner, etc. — a good group of contributors) and because we were all local, we could all hang out fairly often. While many of us met and bonded from 89-92, Jack Straw was a later arrival. It’s one thing when you’ve got a community coming together. It’s another when you have an established community and an outsider finds you all funny enough to want to be a part of it. It was like his interest was a compliment.

Straw would come over to the townhouse that Walrustitty and I lived in and network game with us and a few others. As The REAL Man said the other night, Jack was one of the few guys who wasn’t one of us, but then became one of us. The year that Walrustitty and I spent in that townhouse was so much fun. It was from 1997 until the summer of 1998, and we gamed the HELL out of that place. It was the first time I lived in a place with the Internet. It was the first time I lived in a place with permanently networked computers, allowing us all to be playing the same game at the same time. I remember having Jack and some other friends over for a weekend. We started playing Starcraft (I have been asked by certain Starcraft aficionados to not drag that game into all this. Understood.) Jonathan Blow’s The Witness until about 7 in the morning. He would relentlessly move zerg witnesses around the screen, and I would trudge around, clicking on humans. I went upstairs and collapsed for a few hours. When I woke up I found that Jack was ready to play some more networked games. In fact, he hadn’t slept at all. He loved video games more than I did, to where he could go without sleep.

Games just get a lot better when you are playing them with your friends over a network. I downloaded the Multi-Gauntlet emulator at one point, and had it working with my four Gravis GrIP controllers. Jack, my brother and I started talking about how pointless it was to get treasure in Gauntlet when coins were no object. We were hanging out in front of what could have been — at most — a 15″ monitor (Awful even for 1998; I’m always a good 10 years behind on monitors) playing Gauntlet II, getting treaaaaaaaaaaazhure. I have no idea why we started saying it that way. Well, Jack was probably stoned out of his gourd, but I’m not sure why I joined him in making the “e” and the “a” four seconds long. Gauntlet II just sort of gets hypnotic eventually. Hypnotized by the treaaaaaazhure chests, I would guess.

I moved to Colorado eventually. You’re not going to believe this, but as someone who stayed in Rochester, his job situation became progressively shitty. Whatever financial depression the rest of the country is going through, it hit western New York 13 years ago. Jack met a woman (“Blue”) that he had a baby (Noel) with. While his girlfriend was pregnant, we were all out one night and going to pick up something from Burger King. Blue had a very complicated order, that was perfectly acceptable because she was carrying another human inside her. I recall that the burger needed to have multiple pieces of cheese. And pickles as well, I think. Jack tried to explain the build order witness-creation order to the drive-through guy from the back seat of whatever piece of crap I was driving, who getting increasingly pissed. That lead to this exchange:

Blue: He’s not going to spit in the burger is he?
Jack: Oh yeah, definitely.
ICJ: It’s more spit than burger now

Okay, I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was along those lines. We paid for the food but found another place to eat and order there as well, because we were absolutely certain that guy spit in the food. (Plus, it being Rochester, the only real thing to do is eat.) I remember how chill and laid-back Jack was. He didn’t care how many places we went. “If I get a woman pregnant someday,” I thought, “I’m gonna be as chill as this guy.”

It didn’t work out between Jack and Blue. They were one of many couples who split after they had a kid. There were custody issues, all that sort of stuff. But Jack and I remained in touch, because we posted on the same BBSs. I’m really close to those people I share bulletin boards with, regardless of distance.

I saw him virtually every time I went back home to NY. As our group got older and bought houses and had children, we’d go over to Walrustitty’s to play Bomberman ’94. Jack met another girl and married her. They had a daughter as well (Mia). Once, when getting kicked out of a club in Canada because our gang wasn’t drinking quickly enough, he informed me from the back seat that he really needed to take a piss. I wanted to find some place for us to do that, but the highway between Toronto and Rochester might as well be the stretch of space between Earth and Mars. Not a lot of options. Jack went as long as he could and then – with his future bride in the car – somehow arranged himself to piss out the right rear passenger window. I’m telling you this because trying to contort yourself into some pantomime of humanity in order to do that deserves a mention. I’m telling you because, even though you had to be there, it was hilarious. I’m telling you because I wanted there to be one single place on the Internet that somewhat remembers my friend Jack Straw as the warm, friendly, hilarious and good friend that I remember him to be.

Jack Straw was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Lake George, NY on Tuesday.

But before he killed himself, he killed his two little girls as well. Noel, aged 10 and Mia, aged 3.

And it’s… it’s the worst thing regular people can do, isn’t it? It’s like the most evil thing a regular joe can manage to pull off in this world. To want to spite the two women you had children with so badly, and make them suffer for the rest of their lives. It’s the worst nightmare of every parent.

Jack crashed his cars, when he was still with us. He did it… I mean, he did it a lot but not all the time, but more than you think. Semi-rare. Imagine the frequency of, I don’t know, Seattle Mariners playoff appearances. He drove recklessly, for no reason any of us could fathom. After one such debacle, years ago but after Noel was born, he posted about it on JC and was getting an enormous shit from some of the other gang, who had basically left the forum and come back to yell at him. Jack wrote:

I really need to start a BBS and just give RobB access; he’s the only fucking guy out of the whole lot of you that doesn’t judge me.

Not gonna judge you, partner. It’s inexcusable and you’ve left everyone who cared about you wondering what the fuck. You fucked up as badly as a single person can fuck up. There isn’t any excuse. And I can’t make any more sense out of it than that.

I know that many people who get the Planet IF feed are probably already aware that I am selling the two-disc Cryptozookeeper pack on my webpage. You can buy it by clicking here, then clicking the “Buy Now” button and letting the magic happen from there. (If you want it, but find Paypal to be an invention of the devil, just send me an e-mail and we’ll get you set up for a check. My experiences with Paypal have been pleasant and professional. Not an invention of the devil at all.) So I am just going to make this announcement and then stop cramming my greasy, palm-open nattering into the Planet IF feed.

What can I tell you about the packs? Well, I shot a promotional picture of them with an okapi. The okapi was the symbol of the now-defunct International Society of Cryptozoology. I suspect it was picked because it’s an enormous, “Ha ha!” to the doubters, to the haters. People thought the descriptions of the okapi was BS, but then the proper people found it.

(A lot of people have expressed interest in the plush okapi. Someone is going to make a lot of money if they can figure out a way to get a stuffed okapi to bleat Zork at you. “A large platinum baaaaahr baaaaaahr” — wait, that’s a goat.)

With that in mind, Clint Hoagland is the mastermind behind the electronica band Bachelor Machines. I met him through the web forum Caltrops. Clint posts music tracks every few months that just blow me away. Caltrops is pretty tame these days, but it used to be a place where we would routinely say awful things to each other. Clint would then post songs that — to me — became the beautiful soundtrack to a nasty virtual world.

(Bachelor Machines released an album called A House Is A Machine For Living, and you can buy it in digital or physical form here.)

I spent a lot of time listening to hundreds of hours of Creative Commons-licensed music in order to get a soundtrack I was happy with for the game. Due to the logistics involved, the CD is just the work of Clint, with a remix of a Bachelor Machines song from DJ Beatloaf.

The main character of the game, William Vest, was played by actor Gerrit Hamilton. There’s no way to know what Gerrit sounds like just by playing the game, but I can link you to some shorts he’s been involved with that are on Youtube. All of them are funny, and none of them more than a few minutes in length. The first is The Pillow Case, which was made for the 48 Hour Film Project in 2007. He was also part of FREE BAT DAY with many of the same cast and crew.

Jon Blask played Grimloft, and he is a text adventure author himself. Here is a page that acts as a portal to discovering and experiencing his work.

Back to the DVD release, the art is included in a separate .rar file as well. I ended up taking two trips into New Mexico. The second time, I realized I had no photographs of adobes. With my +3 boots of trespassing, I got some shots of people’s homes in adobe form all right. Where I was previously using my friend’s haunted house for locales, I was able to go into a bit more depth thanks to being kidnapped by my girlfriend Melissa and taken to Taos without advance knowledge by my girlfriend. She is amazingly supportive.

(However, I don’t use the term “interactive fiction” or “IF” around her. I’d just been calling them text games. Fast-forward to earlier this week: Melissa and I had dinner with Paul O’Brian, Adam Cadre and Elizabeth Sweeney — Elizabeth is doing her dissertation on interactive fiction, a fact I did not know. When the subject came up, she said something to the effect of, “Well, this is one group that I don’t need to define IF for!” A term Mel has never heard, natch. I got Melissa on the same page as everyone, although after dinner she told me that before I cut in and explained it, the only thing she could think those initials could have stood for was in-vitro fertilization.

There is one more person I gotta thank. My good friend Steve (“Aardvark” on the JC forum) made the sea monkey coupon up top. I opened my mail yesterday, found the personal check he sent and was greeted by that thing. He took the time to scan in and Photoshop what I think we can all agree was the greatest comic book ad ever (sorry x-ray specs; it was a loaded century) into a really hilarious piece of mail. Vark plays a character you see halfway through the game and while I tried to make his fate funny, I’m gonna be honest here. It’s not going to be on the level of a surprise reworked sea monkeys ad.

I still think the pack is a lot of fun, and please feel free to purchase one from the site at any time.