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Two things from the distant past I’m trying to find

1. A Mind Forever Voyaging

I played this very engaging text adventure game, one of the best pieces of interactive sci-fi I’ve seen, on a friend’s Amiga in my first year at Crazy Go Nuts University, but never actually finished it.

Does anyone know where I can buy or download a copy of this game?

(Bonus reading: Check out Grand Text Auto, a blog about “computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms, including interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, and shared virtual environments.”)

2. A copy of the MAD anthology with the scooter story

You might be able to tell from my stories that MAD magazine, which I read voraciously as a kid, is one of my influences. I remember one specific anthology of 1960s MAD which had a story about the rising popularity of scooters and how they’d be an indispensable part of our lives in the future. The story predicted that in the future, Americans would end up shaped like Weebles, with their legs reduced to vestigial nubbins. The last panel shows a buck-toothed caricature of a Vietnamese solider pushing an American around as if he were one of the those inflatable clown puching bags that bounce back after you punch them. I wanted to post some scans of this comic when the Segway was announced.

Does anyone know whch MAD anthology contains this story?

(Special bonus irony: Jack Kamen, father of Segway inventor Dean Kamen, was an illustrator who helped redesign MAD magazine in the 1950s.)

13 replies on “Two things from the distant past I’m trying to find”

A Mind Forever Voyaging – Aha… I think I ran that on my old Apple //c. I might still have it in my box of Apple // stuff. I’ll have to check and get back to you. Actually, I also have a load of my own text files marooned back on those 5 1/4″ Pro-Dos discs that I’d love to get liberated into the present, somehow or other.

M.Ace (find via ookworld.com)

Yes, it’s still there. Complete with all of the original and entertaining Infocom packaging. –M.Ace (ookworld.com)

Search for “Masterpieces of Infocom”, “Infocom Adventure Collection”, or “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” on eBay or Amazon. These collections contain AMFV as well as Planetfall, the Zork trilogy, and other text adventure classics.

Also, check out http://www.ifarchive.org — people are still writing text adventures, even if they aren’t the commercial bonanza they were in the early Eighties. Enjoy!

— Scott

this story was originally in MAD Magazine issue 54, April 1960 🙂

(i have the totallymad cds). couldn’t find your e-mail address anywhere around here or i would have sent you the 4 pages.

a picture named mad_04_1960.jpg

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