We quickly learned that if you wanted to get into anything at PAX East that you have to line up early--like an hour or more before a scheduled event. We found places in line outside the Manticore theater well in advance and chatted while we passed the time. The queue kept growing and before we knew it we were being herded into the small room and the show was about to begin.
Soon Jason Scott, the director, took the stage and explained to us what we were about to see and how the content would differ on the soon to be released DVD. He didn't waste much time getting to the film. I don't want to spoil too many details, but it opens by explaining the very roots of text adventure games and interactive fiction; it starts with caves. Enthusiasm about exploring caves got the very first authors going, and the concept of interpreting an imaginary 3D space through text (and possibly a hand-drawn 2D map) expanded until it became a commercial success with Infocom at the fore. Eventually that all came crashing down and the hobbyists continued on the tradition, which is where we stand today. That's just it in a nutshell, though. To get the full history you'll have to watch the movie itself, and maybe read Nick Montfort's book Twisty Little Passages.
The movie concluded and we were treated to an MC Frontalot video about being eaten by a grue, featuring Steve Meretzky! Then the panelists were summoned to the front. The panel included: Dave Lebling, one of the founders of Infocom and one of the authors of the first Zork games; Don Woods, who modified the original ADVENT text adventure game and made it available on the internet back in 1976, calling it Colossal Cave; Brian Moriarty, who authored many games including Trinity, Wishbringer, and Loom, and is currently a professor at WPI; Andrew Plotkin, author of current fan favorites such as Spider and Web, Shade, and The Dreamhold; Nick Montfort, MIT professor and author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction; and the aforementioned Steve Meretzky, author of many games, such as Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Anyone with a bit of knowledge about the history of the medium could see that this was an intense gathering of industry personalities.
The panel discussed various aspects of the movie, and each member brought up how appreciative they were seeing a particular segment of the film that featured blind players and what the games meant to them. At one point everyone on the panel was also asked if they could think of a particular game was influential on them, which when the question came to Don Woods it became quite funny because the man practically invented the genre.
I'm acutally finding it hard to bring up particular memories about the panel talk itself, being that at the time it was nearing midnight after a long day at PAX, but I do recall that my favorite part was when Dave Lebling personally apologized for the notorious Oddly-Angled Room puzzle (a part of Zork II that relied on knowledge of a baseball diamond to solve, which was not very friendly to foreign players) and Steve Meretzky chimed in that Dave should have listened to him when he was QA for the game and had warned him that the puzzle sucked. I do love me some Quality Assurance humor!
My boyfriend and I got home and immediately pre-ordered the DVD! There are going to be a lot of extras, with some going into more depth about the history of Infocom, and the final cut of the movie will be much longer than the hour-long one that was shown. The disk will also contain many text adventure games to play! I know I'm excited for it. Now we just have to...
>WAIT
>WAIT
>WAIT
>YOU HAVE BEEN EATEN BY A GRUE._