quest_ebooks and quest_glitches
I let most of my twtr experiments die off, but moved two of them to The Fediverse.
Where they are wildly less popular!
See also on trenchant.org: quest glitches, quest_ebooks, glitch_eve.exe, pg_114_glitch.exe, sci_glitch.exe.
In a world of cheap generative AI, I could probably revisit these and make some things that are interesting/weirder, but I haven’t had the time to think about it or try.
Sometimes people ask me about how they work, and there was an article a few years ago about them – a twitter bot turns old sierra games into beautiful glitches – which is long gone but Internet Archive has… something.
Here’s a slightly edited version of the email I wrote up explaining the bots for the article.
quest_ebooks and quest_glitches
I was inspired to create quest_ebooks partly after I saw Andrew Vestal’s “you are carrying” bot, which tweets out item lists based on inventory from Infocom games. (Note: Andrew lived across the hall from me in college.) I had been thinking about doing something with bots and Sierra stuff for a while and that finally pushed me into diving into getting it done, because I thought that was just awesome.
But quest_ebooks works by using text extracted from early Sierra games, constructing some statistical models, then generating text that similar to that. Same way most _ebooks style bots work.
The hard work here was done by others long before me - Sierra in creating games, a community of fans who created tools to disassemble Sierra games, understand the formats and engines, and create new ones using the same engine, and people who created frameworks to easily create “ebooks” style twitter bots (the one I used was created by Jaiden Mispy.) I did the easy work of connecting it together!
For quest_glitches, as I was creating quest_ebooks and learning about the early Sierra games data formats, I found out that the background pictures weren’t stored the way I expected and it kind of blew my mind. In later games, and the way I thought it would work, the backgrounds are bitmaps. Basically a straight forward mapping of pixel colors to a specific position.
Early Sierra game backgrounds are a vector format, a series of commands like - draw this line, change color, draw this circle, change color, fill this region starting here with this pattern, draw a rectangle. This makes them much more compact. My thought was it would be interesting to glitch these things out based on understanding that data format.
I found the source code to some old DOS utilities by Lance Ewing – that displayed these images, and updated them to build in a modern context and output PNG images.
I then did a bunch of experiments - extracting drawing commands from the original files and creating new images, shuffling the commands, randomly generating new ones, and generally trying to create interesting stuff. None of it was that interesting.
Eventually I wrote some straightforward code in C to glitch out the underlying picture files, simulating if the original bits had rotted away or changed in some way, then generated the PNG from that corrupted data. After some one-offs and experiments with that, I eventually hooked it up to output to Twitter regularly, which is what quest_glitches does now.
Why I made them? A big part is an act of love and admiration and fandom - I love adventure games, and particularly loved Sierra games growing up. And there’s some sense that with these generative programs, simple and primitive as they are, there’s this little bit of illusion of infinity and immortality to these things we loved. That omniscient, antagonistic, baffling Sierra game narrator gets to live forever saying crazy stuff, how great is that?
· · ·
If you enjoyed this post, send emoji to my phone
🐸
🎯
🍩