Written by Joe Pranevich
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Merry Christmas! I have a confession to make. When I set out to play a Christmas adventure game for the first time back in 2014, I had a game in mind. I vaguely remembered it, but I knew that it was a text adventure that I first played sometime in the mid-90s. I was just learning Linux and had installed Slackware, probably around 1994 or 1995. Included with the distribution was a handful of text-based games: NetTrek, Hunt the Wumpus, Dungeon (mainframe Zork), and others. While I searched around for another text adventure, I found a surprise: a Christmas spoof, very dystopian, where you were challenged to combat the consumerism of the holiday. It also involved dying a lot and being reincarnated as your clone. This game was Paranoia, based on the table-top game of the same name, but I was completely unaware of it as anything other than this amazing experience hidden among the Linux arcana.
A few years ago, I tracked this game down again based on my half-remembered experiences. Fortunately, “Christmas” and “dying clones” don’t go together very often! I expected it to be ancient in computer terms, as vintage at least as the mainframe ports that made up most of the games on the system. Surprisingly, most online sources placed the game as having been written in 1993, and my own research discovered no earlier copies. Eventually, TAG made it far enough in our timeline for me to look at the game for real. Like so many things I thought I knew about this game, that date was wrong.
We’ve told some great stories here and our Christmas games make for surprisingly good ones, but this is the first case I’ve ever seen where the game’s writer was unaware of the game’s release or enduring popularity… until I called him thirty-five years after the last time he thought about it. More after the jump.
