Get Lamp
{{short description|2010 film by Jason Scott}}
{{Infobox film
| name = Get Lamp
| image = Get Lamp screengrab.png
| caption = Title screen
| director = Jason Scott
| producer = Jason Scott
| released = {{Film date|2010|7}}
| language = English
| country = United States
}}
Get Lamp is a 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.{{Cite web
|last = Gagne
|first = Ken
|title = The Grill: Jason Scott
|publisher = Computerworld.com
|date = 26 Jul 2010
|url = http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/350365/The_Grill_Jason_Scott
|archive-url = https://archive.today/20130119151255/http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/350365/The_Grill_Jason_Scott
|url-status = dead
|archive-date = 19 January 2013
|access-date = 8 Aug 2010
}}
Description
The documentary and its hours of episodes and bonus footage contain material from roughly 80 interviews of interactive fiction developers, designers, and players.{{Cite web
| title = Get Lamp: Interviews
| publisher = getlamp.com
| url = http://www.getlamp.com/cast/
| access-date = 8 Aug 2010}} 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.{{cite news|last1=Smith|first1=Graham|title=Get Lamp: text adventure documentary|url=http://www.pcgamer.com/get-lamp-text-adventure-documentary/|access-date=1 February 2016|work=PC Gamer|date=6 August 2010}}
Get Lamp is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial license.{{cite web|url=http://www.getlamp.com/order/|access-date=1 February 2016|title=Get Lamp order page|quote=Production is licensed Creative Commons-Attribution-Sharealike-NonCommercial|archive-date=5 January 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160105010959/http://getlamp.com/order/|url-status=dead}}
Raw interview footage is hosted at the Internet Archive.{{Cite web
| title = The Get Lamp Interview Archives
| url = https://archive.org/details/getlamp-interviews
| access-date = 18 September 2022}}
The name "Get Lamp" comes from the first inventory pickup in arguably the first-ever adventure game, Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure (1975), more commonly known as simply Adventure. The lamp appears as a kind of Easter Egg in nearly 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 Zoë Blade (who started out writing Amiga .MOD files) and Tony Longworth.
Reception
Jeremy Reiner of Ars Technica called it "a gem of a film": "The documentary's peek into the culture of Infocom is one of the most fascinating stories I've seen in all of high technology."{{cite news|title=Looking back at the Infocom era: a review of Get Lamp|url=https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/09/the-great-thing-about/|access-date=1 February 2016|work=Ars Technica|date=29 September 2010}} Gordon Haff of CNET said it "does a great job of capturing a gaming era which is ultimately hard to separate from the history of Infocom."{{cite news|last1=Haff |first1=Gordon|title='Get Lamp' illuminates the text adventure game|url=http://www.cnet.com/news/get-lamp-illuminates-the-text-adventure-game/|access-date=1 February 2016|date=10 August 2010}} In The Guardian, Will Freeman listed it among "Six of the Best Gaming Documentaries": "It is a low-fi doc prone to the sentimental, but takes the viewer on a journey through a world of gaming all too often forgotten now that Call of Duty and Angry Birds are household names."{{cite news|last1=Freeman|first1=Will|title=How augmented reality builds bridge between games and children's books|url=https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/10/augmented-reality-books-video-games|access-date=1 February 2016 |work=The Guardian |date=10 March 2014}}
Gallery
File:GET LAMP Packing August 2010.jpg|Get Lamp cases
File:GET LAMP coins.jpg|Get Lamp coins
File:GET LAMP coin close.jpg|Near view of a Lamp coin
See also
References
{{reflist|30em}}
External links
{{commons category|GET LAMP}}
- {{official website|url=http://www.getlamp.com/}}
- [http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Get_Lamp Get Lamp article] on IFWiki.org
- {{IMDb title|1756529}}
Media
- {{YouTube|id=JzOPVe7Usms|title="Get Lamp trailer"}}
- {{YouTube|id=LRhbcDzbGSU|title="Get Lamp Commentary and presentation"}} at GoogleTechTalk
- [https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet The Infocom Cabinet] at the Internet Archive
::Collections of Infocom documents scanned by Jason Scott in preparing the documentary
- [https://archive.org/details/getlamp-interviews The GET LAMP Interviews] at the Internet Archive
- [https://archive.org/details/GET_LAMP_The_Text_Adventure_Documentary "The Get Lamp" DVDs] Full .ISO Copy at the Internet Archive
{{Infocom games}}
{{Jason Scott}}
Category:American documentary films
Category:Creative Commons-licensed documentary films
Category:Documentary films about video games
Category:2010 documentary films
Category:Films directed by Jason Scott