Black House is live.
So, er, what is it? Well, Black House is an interactive fiction, a text adventure. You read descriptions, then you type in simple instructions and see what happens, like this:
You wake up in a room rapidly filling with water. There is a jug of whiskey and a small sponge next to you.
> Eat sponge
You chew on the sponge for a while, then die of stupidity.
<YOU HAVE DIED>
Well, something like that. Here’s the story of the story.
ZORK
Back in the sands of time, I played a lot of these sorts of games — Zork and its many descendants. I was always instantly hooked by the idea that these little text universes might be infinite, that if I poked around long enough I would stumble onto an endless series of hidden rooms and tricks. They weren’t infinite, but there were enough hidden things to manage the illusion. I liked solving the puzzles, but I enjoyed just roaming around trying stuff just as much.
MAZE
Then, sometime later I discovered a book called Maze by Christopher Manson (which I’ve written about before because it is incredible) which had the same spirit, if a somewhat darker tone. Maze is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s very similar in some ways to a text adventure.
As is my Method, Maze inspired me to rip it off wholesale, so I created my own maze, creatively titled The Maze and so blatantly stealing from Manson’s superior creation I still feel the shame today. I originally created my maze in HTML, then later recreated it in Visual Basic and spat out a Windows EXE file. What can I say: I’m just that cool international man of mystery sort who coded shit in VB in the 1990s and early 2000s. You’re jealous. Let it drift.
Marks
The third piece of this puzzle is Philip K. Marks, a character I started writing about in the 1990s. Marks is a kind of shitheel private investigator who specializes in weird, paranormal, sci-fi mysteries. I’ve published five stories featuring Marks, and a few years ago I thought it was time to write a novel-length story with the character. When I thought about what story to put Marks in, I thought of my old maze, and got excited about turning the maze into a novel. The end result was Black House, which I loved but had its flaws.
Black House wasn’t really saleable, so I sat on it for a while, then a few years ago I tried an experiment: I published it online, one chapter a day for about a month, then one day after the last chapter went up I pulled it down. The site is still there, if you’re curious.
Which brings us to today: I stumbled on this Medium article by Julie Stevenson a few months ago. I’d worked in Inform back in 2010 when creating the site for The Eternal Prison, which featured a flawed and half-finished text adventure, so I was reminded that this was something I could actually do.
So I did.
I was intrigued by the idea of turning a novel-like thing into a text adventure, and Black House, having come from a text adventure of sorts to begin with, was the perfect source. That’s what Black House, the game, is: A novel in text-adventure form.
Go on: Play.