January 30, 2005
The IF 1893 Makes The Times
Peter Nepstad’s 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, a historically-grounded interactive fiction mystery written in TADS, may not have very impressive sales when compared to Halo 2. But it did rate an article in today’s New York Times. Here’s the info on 1983 from Baf’s Guide, including a link to free demo of the game.
January 30th, 2005 at 10:56 am
I like his eventual marketing strategy of slipping booksmarks into copies of White City, in bookstores, trying to piggyback on the success of another work of literature to sell his work. Nick, are there many other recent examples of people selling their IF? I was under the impression that most of it is given away online.
January 30th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
IF for sale is pretty rare. Future Boy and 1893 are the two major pieces I know about, but in a similar category are special editions of free IF that are for sale with “feelies.” (Emily Short’s City of Secrets was offered for sale this way, and a feelies-only packet, without CD, is still available.) Personally, I would still chose to do something similar if I wanted to enter a marketplace of any sort – sell a limited edition of some sort while making the program itself available to everyone for free. Of course, Kent Tessman (Future Boy) created a whole cross-platform multimedia IF development system, and made that available to everyone for free, so it’s hard for me to complain very vociferously about his selling Future Boy.
I should note that the IF-Review review of 1893 wasn’t extremely positive, but it did say that the game was highly polished, enormous, and as exhaustively researched, as advertised.
January 30th, 2005 at 7:04 pm
I hadn’t seen your hardback ‘novel machine’ before. The picture alone is priceless. (In the sense of, I’m both impressed at its cleverness and artistic statement, and also just think it’s hilarious.)
January 30th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
I’m sort of with you on the marketing e-lit question. The current audience is small enough that more interesting new work almost needs to be free before it will be viable to sell it in the way that books are sold, though I salute those who do experiment with marketing their work. Thanks for the link to feelies. I hadn’t seen that. Great fun.
January 30th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Hope you don’t mind, I started a new thread on the topic of marketing e-lit.