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Thomas M. Disch, author of the 1986 text adventure Amnesia by Ice Cream Jonsey 07/07/2008, 2:00am PDT
committed suicide on July 4th.

Here is a blog post with slightly more info.

Annnnnd here is his Livejournal.

Amnesia was GOOD. It was published by Electronic Arts. It gave us a brief glimpse into a world where there were people other than Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9 and Scott Adams making games. They cobbled the engine and parser together themselves and seeing a unique take on the genre was, and remains, just interesting. By the second time you have played a game by Level 9, you can sort of start to anticipate the puzzles the developers are going to throw at you because their engine supports ordering people around and solving puzzles through queued NPCs.

Amnesia purported to have an entire burough of New York City programmed into a couple floppy disks, and when you are a dumb kid you have no idea that the only way that would be possible would be through an array that gave each room a common description. Amnesia will always be "that game" for me, the one that was going to be infinite. I guess if you are British that game was Elite, if you didn't like text games maybe it was Starflight. There was a lot of things that Amnesia tried to do, and failed at, but it tried, at least. Seeing a video game try and fail is fine by me, and I could never dislike one that does so. Amnesia wasn't perfect, but it was the sort of thing that makes you not feel like a loser for choosing this hobby, for a little while.


ICJ
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Thomas M. Disch, author of the 1986 text adventure Amnesia by Ice Cream Jonsey 07/07/2008, 2:00am PDT NEW
    He couldn't go on without his boyfriend / rent-controlled apartment :( by Jerry Whorebach 07/07/2008, 4:09am PDT NEW
 
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