Get Lamp

Get Lamp is a documentary about interactive fiction (a genre that includes text adventures) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. Scott conducted the interviews between February 2006 and February 2008, and the documentary was released in July 2010.[1]

Get Lamp
Title screen
Directed byJason Scott
Produced byJason Scott
Release date
  • July 2010 (2010-07)
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Description

The documentary and its hours of episodes and bonus footage contain material from roughly 80 interviews of interactive fiction developers, designers, and players.[2] Included in the bonus footage is a nearly 50-minute documentary about Infocom, the best-known commercial publisher of interactive fiction. The DVD release included photographs, essays, and a collectible coin.[3]

Get Lamp is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial license.[4]

Raw interview footage is hosted at the Internet Archive.[5]

The name "Get Lamp" comes from the first inventory pickup in arguably the first-ever adventure game, Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure (1975), more commonly known as simply Adventure. The lamp appears as a kind of Easter Egg in nearly every interview. The film starts off with a tour of part of the real-life Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky that Adventure was based on. The soundtrack includes Creative Commons-licensed work from Zoë Blade (who started out writing Amiga .MOD files) and Tony Longworth.[6]

Reception

Jeremy Reiner of Ars Technica called it "a gem of a film": "The documentary's peek into the culture of Infocom is one of the most fascinating stories I've seen in all of high technology."[6] Gordon Haff of CNET said it "does a great job of capturing a gaming era which is ultimately hard to separate from the history of Infocom."[7] In The Guardian, Will Freeman listed it among "Six of the Best Gaming Documentaries": "It is a low-fi doc prone to the sentimental, but takes the viewer on a journey through a world of gaming all too often forgotten now that Call of Duty and Angry Birds are household names."[8]

  • Get Lamp cases
    Get Lamp cases
  • Get Lamp coins
    Get Lamp coins
  • Near view of a Lamp coin
    Near view of a Lamp coin

See also

References
  1. Gagne, Ken (26 Jul 2010). "The Grill: Jason Scott". Computerworld.com. Archived from the original on 19 January 2013. Retrieved 8 Aug 2010.
  2. "Get Lamp: Interviews". getlamp.com. Retrieved 8 Aug 2010.
  3. Smith, Graham (6 August 2010). "Get Lamp: text adventure documentary". PC Gamer. Retrieved 1 February 2016.
  4. "Get Lamp order page". Archived from the original on 5 January 2016. Retrieved 1 February 2016. Production is licensed Creative Commons-Attribution-Sharealike-NonCommercial
  5. "The GET LAMP Interview Archives". Retrieved 18 September 2022.
  6. "Looking back at the Infocom era: a review of Get Lamp". Ars Technica. 29 September 2010. Retrieved 1 February 2016.
  7. Haff, Gordon (10 August 2010). "'Get Lamp' illuminates the text adventure game". Retrieved 1 February 2016.
  8. Freeman, Will (10 March 2014). "How augmented reality builds bridge between games and children's books". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 February 2016.
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