Don Woods famously added the more “Tolkienised” aspects of the Colossal Cave Adventure game after rewriting it in 1977. Woods’ rewriting/recoding/versioning of the game is another [TGOTT] inspirational treasure: Woods and others who have remixed and rewritten Adventure have opened this game to a constant flow of imaginative reinterpretations.
When immersed in Sidequest!, players may sometimes find themselves following an Ancient Path to a city inside the Hollow earth called Agartha. We members of [TGOTT] found an entrance at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. As we crawled through the portal we passed through – and became – Will Crowther, crafting his computer-mediated memory of the present moment to share with his daughters. With Admiral Richard E. Byrd flying overhead (in a story told to us by Dr. Raymond Bernard in 1969) and 2,300 miles beyond the South Pole through a hole in Antarctica, we/he began watching the sky mirror reflect the sky below as he went inside the Hollow Earth. UFOs and Governmental Secrecy? December, 1929? February, 1947? November, 1955? January, 1956? February, 2009? Many unanswered player questions can be found frozen in the Arctic ice.
There are more Sidequest! entries buried underground than the Library of the Mystic Arts. Since 1969, the ARPANET has run on dedicated cables which were themselves buried underground. This internet backbone stretched across the United States and now has (obviously) expanded to an international and ubiquitous scale. ARPANET, that early military-industrial-academic-complex of only a few nodes, literally lay the underground network for us to crawl through. We (as William Crowther) were instrumental in the original ARPANET development team when we worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman building core technologies. In Sidequest! there is an option to begin at this starting point and crawl into lower levels of the military-industrial-academic-operating-system. This point resides closer to the kernel beside a datastream tumbling along a Classical Von Neumann machine.
Sometimes we drift out of this datastream, sailing upstream against assumptions to the The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab: another Sidequest! story starting place. We surface in the warm Californian sun at the end of Arastradero Road. This road sits before the D.C. Power Building in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Californian foothills roll across the view with scattered trees underneath. Graduate Computer Science students run through these trees in infinite loops while attempting to decode the possibilities of playing chess with a majikal machine. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully and you, William Crowther, can remember when it was made of pure data and flowing along underneath the cave floor at 56K.
Sidequest! is written in Python with entries authored by jonCates and programmed by Tamas Kemenczy and Jake Elliott: metaphors are mixed and transcendentally transposed over unstable timespaces. As we crawl closer to the center of the game, the connections are more random and fleeting, and flirt with more self-reflective recursions. This is what we mean when we say Sidequest! is “cyberpsychedelic” through combining the effects of mixing Cybernetics and Psychedelics as cultural influences, technologies and aesthetic principles.
