The Digital Preservation staff at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library have plunged into the Tom Disch archives in their Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript collection to resurrect a gem of a game from 1986, Amnesia, for an exhibition titled “Remembering Amnesia: Rebooting the first computerized novel”. And the reboot is very true-to-life as the game is available on 3 workstations set up to emulate its native Commodore 64 environment (lags in booting and running the game, included).
Amnesia, published by Electronic Arts, is a notoriously difficult game, full of Disch’s keen observations of Manhattan locales and hard-to-crack puzzles to solve and numerous pitfalls to avoid in order to move the protagonist forward. And there is a lot of ground to cover, considering the game starts with:
You wake up naked in a hotel room. You don’t recall who you are or how you got there. Your clothes are missing. Someone knocks on the door.
To ease the frustration of current-day players, the exhibit materials also include reviews from 1986, which share both the fun and the agony of those long-ago competitors who first struggled to find clothing and answers for Disch’s memory-less character.
