Itzamná, The Maya God of the Sky and of Writing...

The Electronic Literature Organization

I am former Secratary of the board of the ELO, which has been promoting reading, writing, and publishing in electronic media since 1999. This is the link:

Hypertext
In the 1980s I wrote technical user manuals for Apple computer, scripted and designed computer games. My dream project was Portal, conceived by producer Brad Fregger and myself in 1984. I had thought, since writing The Time Trip, that computers would make an interesting medium for storytelling — interactive, dynamic, technical. Portal was a real interactive novel on disk and designed from the beginning as a computer experience. The conceit was that the user is an astronaut returned to Earth after a failed mission. He or she finds the planet empty of people and one tiny cursor blinking on an abandoned terminal.... Waking up the Worldnet (an imagined internet before there was such a thing) and puzzling out the story of what happened to mankind was the goal. Though this was in no way a game, Activision, the publisher, utterly failed to understand this. Portal was later published in hard copy — as a book — available from Barnes and Noble. The text for the novel can be found on a web site. Images and reviews of the game can be found at Moby Games. In the past I have also found places to download both the software and an Amiga emulator on which to run it.Full text can be found at Stodge.org.

In About Time two stories parallel each other, one about a contemporary business guru who tries to prove there was a migration from Australia to the western hemisphere many tens of thousands of years ago, and the other about a family of Australian Aborigines who actually did it. This is a satire on pundits and pop archaeology.

Down Time is a CDROM of short stories, narrated, with excellent music by electronic composer Alan Strange. There are some interesting navigation features as well. Written in Director and published by Eastgate.

Directions was an extended Hypercard poem, also published by Eastgate.

Computer Games

I worked on several computer games during the 1980s, including Portal (though as I said, it wasn't a game).

Murder on the Mississippi was one of my favorite scripts, a riverboat filled with excentric characters, a murder, and the clock ticking before landfall at the next stop, when the murderer would get away. I worked on a remote terminal at home connected to a PDP11. I have no idea whether the downloads for these games still work, but the links are there.

L.A. Crackdown, the last game Epyx did before it went out of business, was another I scripted. I disclaim all responsibility. It was about surveillance, well before Homeland Security.