The Artful Gamer

 Way back in August I had the opportunity to order a copy of Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine. As a bonus, Himalaya Studios included a promotional Quest for Glory II poster drawn by the wonderful print and digital artist Eriq Chang. After a few notes back and forth, Eriq agreed to have some of his work profiled by yours truly.

In this article I’d like to introduce some of Eriq’s wonderful work done for notable game developers such as AGDInteractive/Himalaya Studios, Infamous Adventures, and Telltale Games, among others. Eriq’s work demonstrates the kinds of deep, expressive, worlds possible when artists with a rich background in gaming transform their imaginations into ink and paint strokes.

Eriq has graciously contributed two previously unseen production illustrations from a cancelled King’s Quest IV remake, and concept art for the upcoming game PartWorld.
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Although I try not to post links, this little piece of BASIC poetry written by Matthew Sewell caught my eye. On the SWCollect mailing list, Matt wrote of his jeering poesy:

It struck me that the first line of the Frost poem was like the start of a Colossal Cave type of game (“You are standing at the end of a road…”). So I took it from there, adding a snarky Infocom voice to a poem that I consider over-serious. The code is primitive to be sure (though it does work), but both the editor and I were concerned about accessibility. Actually he’s the one who encouraged me to expand the frame of reference to several other games — he figured that if we’re doing this, we might as well commit to it. Anyway, you all are just about the only people I know who will consider it too obvious rather than too obscure…

Hardcore retro-gaming, text adventure, and BASIC-coding enthusiasts might be able to parse the program just using their imagination, but I needed some help. I copied and pasted the program (from Lines 10 to 490) into Joshua Bell’s Applesoft BASIC Interpreter, clicked Run, and enjoyed 45 seconds of pretentious smirking. Does anyone else find this ingeniously funny?

Maybe I’m getting old.

Hi again folks. What were meant to be a handful of articles posted over a couple of weeks became a couple of articles posted over a few months! Due to teaching responsibilities last year I had to take an unscheduled hiatus from writing.

I’m excited to get back to our regularly scheduled programming, and I’m proud to launch into the new year with the second article in our Origin Museum series. In this part of the series, Joe Garrity (curator of the Origin Museum) shares his story of giving Richard Garriott a very special gift during the University of Texas Video Game Archive Fundraiser at Britannia Manor in 2007. The degree of craftsmanship that went into the gift is reminiscent of Infocom and Ultima ”feelies” – the expression of an artist’s love for their work, and I believe demonstrates how games not only entertain and surprise us – but how they can lead to new works of art and relationships with those around us.

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