'Get Lamp' illuminates the text adventure game

Jason Scott's first documentary in 2005 was about bulletin board systems (BBSs), which were in a sense the PC world's parallel evolution of the early Internet. This documentary, really more a multi-disc series of interviews with BBS pioneers than a documentary film as such, brought back to me my early years in personal computing and my subsequent forays into shareware software development through the mid-1990s. Now, Scott has tackled a subject from roughly the same era: the text adventure game. My involvement here was more peripheral but no less a part of my memories. As his new "Get Lamp" documentary recounts, the text adventure genre began with Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure game in the early 1970s, more commonly referred to as just Adventure.