Last year, Aaron A. Reid published “50 Years of Text Games,” a fascinating history of games where you have to “get a lamp” or “fly down the Columbia River.” The book covers classic games like “Hunt the Wumpus” and “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” as well as more recent games like “Dwarf Fortress” and “80 Days” where you do fascinating things with on-screen text. He has now published a companion book, “Further Explorations,” which covers some of the material he was forced to omit from the original, which covered one iconic game from each year from 1971 to 2020, but is still fascinating.
These include games you may have heard of, like the Lovecraftian horror adventure Anchorhead, and lesser known titles, like one that used a simulated model of every block in Manhattan below 110th Street. Reed excels at retelling famous Infocom classics and unearthing ones you've never heard of, like Silver Wolf, one of eight acclaimed but now forgotten text adventures developed by St. Bride's School, a studio made up of Irish women dressed like Victorian cultists.
Further Explorations' broader scope allows Reed to extend his reach into closer-to-text genres like visual novels and hacking simulations, as well as broader discussions: His analysis of a game based on Stephen King's short story “The Mist” prompts reflections on the difficulties that face all video game adaptations, whether they're based on Roger Zelazny's popular fantasy novel “Amber” series or a Monty Python sketch about buying cheese (no, really, it's a game called “Cheese Shop”).
Further Explorations isn't entirely devoid of visuals, but many of the games it covers are. Seeing maps of the sci-fi complex you explore in Planetfall or flowcharts of your path in Nine Princes of Amber brings mere words on a page to visualization, and it ends with a timeline of the genre stretching all the way back to 1760, when the first interactive novel, Tristram Shandy, was published. It's very satisfying.
Further Explorations is available in epub and pdf formats on itch.io, with physical copies available from Amazon, and both also available on DriveThru.
