Why have you decided to do a documentary on text adventures?

It's 2005, and I haven't seen a documentary that interviews the creators of interactive fiction/text adventures. So I guess I better make one! The history of this interesting genre of game and entertainment is now over 30 years (and further), and I think the time has come to tell its story.

But what about the Interactive Fiction websites out there? Are you duplicating their work?

Make no mistake: there are a lot of people who have done amazing work in collecting stories, artifacts, reviews and writings about Interactive Fiction; they've been doing it for a very long time, and they do it well. I am not trying to usurp their work (and I have contacted a good number of them, and will be contacting more), but instead work on telling the story in a different medium. I intend to credit these sites and people heavily, and in some cases have already been in discussions and conversations with them. I'm not "revealing" the text adventure to the world for the first time; I'm trying to get down on video the story of the people behind this art form and to tell it in an interesting fashion, as I did with my previous work.

I was involved with text adventures and you haven't contacted me.

I have a strong belief that people should not be contacted about a subject until the filmmaker/researcher has learned a solid block of that subject. I can think of nothing worse than engaging a future interviewee about their history in e-mail and getting fundamental facts wrong. As a result, I haven't contacted many people directly yet. That said, if you are someone who thinks I should be interviewing them, or if you expect that my phone call is inevitable, please feel free to mail me and let me know your opinions.

Is this going to be as big as the BBS Documentary was?

The subject defines itself over filming, but I can't currently see how I could end up with a work that large again. I certainly like having bonus footage and features on DVDs, but the BBS documentary was five and a half hours long; this will not be anywhere near that, and it certainly won't take up 3 DVDs. In the case of the BBS documentary, I had many different storylines and scenes to try and cover in some fashion. Some were utterly incompatible, so I made them different episodes. That's how it ended up being so long. I consider GET LAMP to be a much smaller project, and so I don't anticipate an epic. Time will tell, of course.

I want to buy it right now.

I appreciate your faith and interest. At this point in production, with so much up in the air, I am currently taking names for a notification list that would tell you when I start filming, when I start editing, and when the final work is available in some form. Just mail me at jason@textfiles.com and let me know you're interested, and I'll put you on that list.