The game requires reading but no typing instead, you choose a particular story path by clicking on highlighted text.
What follows is a short, unsettling tale of friendship, intimacy, and trauma. The game begins with a nod to urban legendry: you’re spending the night at a friend’s house, and this friend has an uncle who supposedly works for Nintendo. The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo reminded me of those Infocom days, skewed more to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format. Boring by today’s standards, revolutionary for its time.
Community maps for a story about my uncle trial#
The hallway branches east and west, with a door at the north end.Īnd so it goes, trial and error, until all rooms are searched, all witnesses are interviewed, and the mystery is solved. A typical sequence goes something like this:
The learning curve is surprisingly steep. The player navigates their world via simple commands (INSPECT, WALK, GET, LISTEN). Written in the 2nd person, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style, these games required the player to take notes, draw their own maps, and-in what must now seem ridiculous-read. Infocom was founded in 1979 by a cadre of MIT students specializing in text adventure games. I imagined uncovering evidence of devil worship instead, I spent the night at Tom’s computer, playing whatever disk happened to be in the drive, which happened to be Infocom’s text-based mystery The Witness. I’m not sure why I felt the need for secrecy it may have had something to do with my suspicions that because Tom’s parents were so laissez-faire, they must be hiding a dark truth. That summer night, after everyone fell asleep, I stole into the den and switched on Tom’s computer. My C64 was cute, chunky, and very much for kids. His Apple IIe was a Kubrickian monolith, heavy and serious, rumored to be capable of hacking into the Pentagon. So Tom owned an Apple IIe and I owned a Commodore 64. We were aware those guns may have killed people, making the already-totemic even more totemic, which is a fancy way of saying that our guns were, in sixth grade terms, cool.īut back to videogames. I held my first UZI at Tom’s house, along with a Beretta pistol and a SPAS-12 combat shotgun. Our host and Dungeon Master, a chubby kid named Tom whose father worked for the ATF, had the sort of life I fantasized about-kitchen pantry filled with junk food, a perpetually-exhausted-hence-absurdly-permissive-mother, and a closet containing firearms seized in federal raids, mechanically gutted but otherwise in perfect condition. Picture a summer night, a trio of sixth graders having just finished D&D’ing, surrounded by empty bags of Doritos, empty tubs of french onion dip, and empty liters of grape Crush. 1984 was my official entrance into videogames the actual year, not the Orwell novel.
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