Steve Meretzky

Steven Eric Meretzky (born May 1, 1957) is an American computer game developer, with dozens of titles to his credit. He has been involved in almost every aspect of game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design. He is best known for creating some of the famous Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with celebrated author Douglas Adams on the interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of the few games to be certified "platinum" by the Software Publishing Association. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment.

His keen wit, prose and coding skill made him one of only two interactive fiction writers (along with Dave Lebling) admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America, and in September 1999, PC Gamer magazine named Meretzky as one of their twenty-five "Game Gods"; those who have made an indelible mark on the history of computer gaming.

Get Lamp

Get Lamp is a two-disc documentary about interactive fiction (a genre that includes text adventures) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. Scott conducted the interviews between February 2006 and February 2008, and the documentary was released in July 2010.

The documentary and its hours of episodes and bonus footage contain material from roughly 80 interviews of interactive fiction developers, designers, and players. Included in the bonus footage is a nearly 50-minute documentary about Infocom, the best-known commercial publisher of interactive fiction. The DVD release included photographs, essays, and a collectible coin.

Get Lamp is licensed under the Creative Commons-Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial license.

Raw interview footage is hosted at the Internet Archive.

The name "Get Lamp" comes from the first inventory pickup in arguably the first-ever adventure game, Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, more commonly known as simply Adventure. The lamp appears as a kind of Easter Egg in every interview. The film starts off with a tour of part of the real-life Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky that Adventure was based on. The soundtrack includes Creative Commons-licensed work from Zoe Blade (who got her start writing Amiga .MOD files) and Tony Longworth.

Stephen

Stephen or Steven /ˈstiːvən/ is a masculine first name, derived from the Greek name Στέφανος (Stéfanos), in turn from the Greek word "στέφανος", meaning "wreath, crown, honour, reward", literally "that which surrounds or encompasses". In ancient Greece, a wreath was given to the winner of a contest (from which the crown, symbol of rulers derived). The use of the noun was first recorded in Homer's Iliad. The name is significant to Christians: according to the Book of Acts in the New Testament, Saint Stephen was a deacon who was stoned to death and is regarded as the first Christian martyr. The name has many variants, which include Stephan, Stevan, Stefan and Stevon.

In Middle English, the name Stephen or Stephan was pronounced as a bi-syllabic word — Step-hen or Step-han — much like a Scandinavian surname. Steve was pronounced as it is in Modern English. This etymological usage began a decline in the mid-19th century.

Steve is the common short form, while various diminutives such as Stevie and Ste are also used. Many family names are derived from Stephen: the most common are Stephens/Stevens and Stephenson/Stevenson (others include Stephen, Stephan, Staphan, Stefan, Stevin and Stever).

Jason Scott

Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970), more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, and filmmaker. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms "Sketch," "SketchCow" and "The Slipped Disk."

He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. He is the creator of a 2005 documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary, and a 2010 documentary film about interactive fiction, GET LAMP.

Scott lives in Hopewell Junction, New York with his cat Sockington. He works for Internet Archive and has given numerous presentations at technology related conferences on the topics of digital history, software, and website preservation.

Education

Jason Scott graduated from Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York and served on the staff of the school newspaper under the title "Humor Staff". While in high school he produced the humor magazine Esnesnon ("nonsense" backwards). He later graduated from Emerson College in 1992 with a film degree. While at Emerson, he worked for the school humor magazine, school newspaper, WERS 88.9 FM radio, and served as art director on several dramatic plays.

Game design

Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game to facilitate interaction between players for entertainment or for medical, educational, or experimental purposes. Game design can be applied both to games and, increasingly, to other interactions, particularly virtual ones (see gamification).

Game design creates goals, rules, and challenges to define a sport, tabletop game, casino game, video game, role-playing game, or simulation that produces desirable interactions among its participants and, possibly, spectators.

Academically, game design is part of game studies, while game theory studies strategic decision making (primarily in non-game situations). Games have historically inspired seminal research in the fields of probability, artificial intelligence, economics, and optimization theory. Applying game design to itself is a current research topic in metadesign.

History

Sports (see history of sports), gambling, and board games are known, respectively, to have existed for at least ten thousand, six thousand, and five thousand years.