4 ms·

Remembering 'Portal,' Activision's Interactive Novel

42 points by infodroid 9y ago

jmcgough 9y ago
Would love to experience it myself. What's the best way to play it now - dosbox?
- blue1 9y ago
  An Amiga emulator, for the Amiga version of Portal.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lotharrr 9y ago
  There's an ebook version floating around, which will give you at least the story (if not the somewhat-interactive way of discovering it). Search for "Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval, by Rob Swigart". The author approved of it being uploaded to a forum (in .lrf form, which I was somehow able to convert to PDF) here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37197 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37197 .
- spectral_gap 9y ago
  The game is playable at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986
DerekL 9y ago
> Using a rather Windows-like, icon-based interface (impressive in the mid-80s), you moved a cursor around the screen to select from database categories like Geographical, History, Medical, Military, PsiLink, and SciTech. From the screen shots, it looks like the game uses the normal Amiga graphical interface. I wonder if the author even knows what an Amiga was, or maybe he knows about games on the Amiga, but he doesn't realize that applications on the Amiga used a GUI.
- jhbadger 9y ago
  It looked exactly the same on the Apple ][. And I'm not talking about the Mac-like IIgs -- I'm talking about the actual 8-bit Apples. It was impressive to see GUIs on machines like that. As for the game, I liked the story, but there really wasn't any gameplay as such -- you merely uncovered more of the story by clicking around. In a way, it reminded me of Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" in that it was a non-linear narrative told in pieces that the reader had to put together into a coherent narrative.
microcolonel 9y ago
> Remembering 'Portal,' Activision's... Aside: After programming, I can not bring myself to place separating punctuation inside quotation marks. It seems entirely wrong to place characters within the quotation when they clearly come from without.
- mlevental 9y ago
  I have never understood that, and consequently never placed punctuation within quotes.

42 points by infodroid 9y ago

jmcgough 9y ago

Would love to experience it myself. What's the best way to play it now - dosbox?

blue1 9y ago
An Amiga emulator, for the Amiga version of Portal.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lotharrr 9y ago
There's an ebook version floating around, which will give you at least the story (if not the somewhat-interactive way of discovering it). Search for "Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval, by Rob Swigart". The author approved of it being uploaded to a forum (in .lrf form, which I was somehow able to convert to PDF) here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37197 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37197 .
spectral_gap 9y ago
The game is playable at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986

DerekL 9y ago

> Using a rather Windows-like, icon-based interface (impressive in the mid-80s), you moved a cursor around the screen to select from database categories like Geographical, History, Medical, Military, PsiLink, and SciTech. From the screen shots, it looks like the game uses the normal Amiga graphical interface. I wonder if the author even knows what an Amiga was, or maybe he knows about games on the Amiga, but he doesn't realize that applications on the Amiga used a GUI.

jhbadger 9y ago
It looked exactly the same on the Apple ][. And I'm not talking about the Mac-like IIgs -- I'm talking about the actual 8-bit Apples. It was impressive to see GUIs on machines like that. As for the game, I liked the story, but there really wasn't any gameplay as such -- you merely uncovered more of the story by clicking around. In a way, it reminded me of Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" in that it was a non-linear narrative told in pieces that the reader had to put together into a coherent narrative.

microcolonel 9y ago

> Remembering 'Portal,' Activision's... Aside: After programming, I can not bring myself to place separating punctuation inside quotation marks. It seems entirely wrong to place characters within the quotation when they clearly come from without.

mlevental 9y ago
I have never understood that, and consequently never placed punctuation within quotes.