Twisted Village and Zork

[dougo]

Today I went to the store-closing party at the Twisted Village record store in Harvard Square. Twisted Village is a record label, run by Wayne & Kate from the band Major Stars (and several other bands before that), and they've had a store since 1996. (I believe that space used to be occupied by the Taang! record label before that; maybe another record label will move in?) They decided it wasn't making enough money to be worth renewing the lease. I'm a little sad, because it was always fun to pop in and browse the used CD bins while killing time in Harvard Square, but I haven't been buying CDs much in the last few years other than at shows (directly from bands).

I brought in a couple CDs I had been planning to sell them but never got around to it: Thurston Moore/Tom Surgal's Not Me, and Glands of External Secretion's Who's Who in Hospitalization. They had good pedigrees (Thurston Moore is from Sonic Youth, and G.o.E.S. had Barbara Manning from SF Seals), but they were both a little too abstract-noise for my taste. I figured they'd fit perfectly into Twisted Village's used bins, though. Instead I just handed them over to Wayne, and either they got sold today (lots of customers when I was there this afternoon) or maybe he'll sell them online or something. Meanwhile I bought a few CDs from their dwindling stacks: Concentrick's Aluminum Lake (used), Masaki Batoh's Collected Works 95-96, and Blues Control's "Puff". I thought about just picking up some random unknown stuff from the 1960s psych bin, but I figured it'd have been pretty well picked-over by then, so I stuck with known quantities. (Concentrick is Tim Green from The Fucking C4AM95, and Masaki Batoh is from Ghost. Well, okay, known quantities to me.)

Then I went over to MIT to join a classroom full of people playing Zork together. They projected a laptop onto a big screen, and had one person typing commands, another (queue) reading descriptions aloud, and another drawing a map on the chalkboard, while the rest of the audience shouted out command suggestions. We played the original mainframe Zork, the predecessor to the Zork trilogy published by Infocom in the early '80s for home computers. (Specifically, we played an Inform 6 port from 2004, which you can now play in your browser.) We spent about 3 hours on it; we died several times (once by typing "KICK BUCKET"), but since in this version you could wander around as a ghost and resurrect yourself, we only had to restart from scratch once (when our lamp ran out and we were eaten by a grue—resurrection doesn't recharge the lamp). Overall we scored around 150 points out of 646, which gives you some idea how long and hard the full game is (remember this was a group of about 20 people all brainstorming in parallel). But it was fun to see this legendary game in action, at MIT where it was written.

Comments

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Damn. I wish I'd known about TV closing.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I still haven't been there, but Weirdo Records is still open (Mass Ave north of Cambridge City Hall), and I think they're similar—Angela used to work at Twisted Village.

[nosrednayduj]

Next time they can all login to LambdaMOO :-)

That sounds fun; wonder how much I would have remembered. I played (and, with KDO, won) the original on MIT-DM, in 1980, logging in from SAIL. Thought it was 626 points, but maybe they added 20 afterwards, or maybe I just don't remember.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

The guy who was mapping had brought a bound stack of printouts (on 132-col printer paper) from a series of sessions of him and a friend solving it circa 1980.

Nick Montfort mentioned that "Hello Sailor" was a reference to SAIL (it being their version of "Hello World"). Somehow I never made that connection before.

Zork

[hinj.livejournal.com]

I keep this on ALL my computers in case I get bored.