The Long Tapestry [rejected Peregrine Pocketbooks pitch]

Unrelated to anything else: I came across a Word doc on my laptop today! It's the pitch for a book on the history of the adventure game that I sent to Peregrine Pocketbooks when they were soliciting submissions. I hadn't looked at it since I wrote it, and they informed me back in March that they were passing on the idea. (Fools! Blaggards!) I will probably do something with the idea at some point, but, meantime, you can check it out if you're interested.

---

Pitch

The accepted narrative is that the graphic adventure game began in 1984 with Roberta Williams’ King’s Quest, which means the genre is approaching its 40th birthday. In those 40 years, the adventure game has been many things: a moderately popular genre for computer nerds, a killer app for selling the first CD-ROM drives, a popular format for children’s games, dead, the laughingstock of console gamers, a freeware indie scene, a subgenre of browser game, a haven for underground experimentation, and a resurrected critical darling. Similar to Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games or Chris Franklin’s Children of DOOM, I would like to take a chronological look at the many faces of genre I love. But, rather than write up the 40 most famous games of those 40 years - which would almost certainly exceed 20,000 words - I’d like to cover the landmarks of the genre’s evolution. So, yes, Maniac Mansion in 1987, Myst in 1993, and The Walking Dead in 2012, but also 1988’s Snatcher and the Japanese visual novel; 1993’s Gabriel Knight and the other Sierra blockbusters designed by women; 2004’s The Crimson Room, which begat a whole genre of “escape the room” Flash games, which, in turn, led to the real-world Escape Rooms; the many Nancy Drew mysteries that thrived while the genre was supposedly “dead,” but never get mentioned because they were only popular with girls; 2006’s The Blackwell Legacy and Trilby’s Notes, products of the freeware Adventure Game Studio; 2012’s Howling Dogs, built in Twine, a simple HTML engine that made game design accessible to people (queer, trans, and/or female) often denied access to such tools; the solidification of the of the “walking sim” with Gome Home and The Stanley Parable in 2013 and its evolution with What Remains of Edith Finch and Tacoma in 2017. Less a comprehensive history than a collection of essays on the history of interactive narrative, of how genres wax and wane on the whims of capital, and how the way games are played and sold determines which games even get made, and by whom.

Bio

Ian Danskin is a writer and video essayist known for his YouTube channel, Innuendo Studios, where he looks at art, culture, and politics through a leftish, social justicey, art-degree-having lens. Though most recognized for his antifascist series The Alt-Right Playbook, his YouTube career began with essays on video games, discussing the nature of internet fame (and infamy) by way of Fez designer Phil Fish, the bizarre genre melding of coming-of-age story and Lynchian psychodrama in Life is Strange, dissecting his decades-long adoration of The Secret of Monkey Island, and discussing abuse dynamics in Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season 2. Perhaps his favorite video on games is his half-hour application of many types of narrative theory to Davey Wreden’s Stanley Parable follow-up, The Beginner’s Guide, which is probably the first time a YouTuber has applied Casetti’s “film enunciation” to video games.

On a personal note: I am also approaching my 40th birthday, having been born the same year King’s Quest came out, and adventure games have been a lifelong love affair for me. The first game I ever owned was Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the first game I ever loved was The Secret of Monkey Island, and LOOM is still probably my favorite game of all time. My channel began more or less as a place to put my opinions on interactive narrative, and from there it unexpectedly turned into a career. During the genre’s “dead years,” I hung out on the Adventure Game Studio and Independent Gaming Source forums to play freeware games made by hobbyists; I backed Double Fine Adventure at $50 when I only had about $150 to my name; when all my work was done on a Mac, I dragged an old PC with no WiFi down to the basement so I could plug it directly into the router and access Steam so I could play The Walking Dead. The idea for this project has been in my head since 2020, but I’ve never been sure what to do with it. Video series? Podcast? And I think Peregrine Pocketbooks would be the perfect medium. It would be a dream for me.

(Provisional) Media List

King’s Quest, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Wishbringer, Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, Snatcher, Quest for Glory, The Secret of Monkey Island, LOOM, LeChuck’s Revenge: Monkey Island 2, King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Myst, Beneath a Steel Sky, Phantasmagoria, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Broken Sword, Riven, The Last Express, Blade Runner, Grim Fandango, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred Blood of the Damned, Escape from Monkey Island, The Longest Journey, Syberia, Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, The Crimson Room, Nancy Drew series, Trilby’s Notes, The Shivah, The Blackwell Legacy, The Graveyard, Machinarium, Heavy Rain, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Counterfeit Monkey, Howling Dogs, The Walking Dead: Season 1, Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Proteus, Broken Age, The Tesla Effect, Moebius: Empire Rising, Deponia series, What Remains of Edith Finch, Tacoma, Unavowed, The Walking Dead: The Final Season, Kentucky Route Zero, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, Norco, Citizen Sleeper.

Writing Samples

• We Don’t Talk about Kenny: Telltale’s Walking Dead Season 2 [23 minutes | 2.1M views | transcript]
• Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? | Genre and the Adventure Game [25 minutes | 155K views | transcript]
• The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and The Beginner’s Guide [33 minutes | 547K views | transcript]