Haru­ki Muraka­mi has a spe­cial way of inspir­ing his fans. I write these very words, in fact, from a cof­fee shop in Seoul not just stocked with his books and the music ref­er­enced in them but named after the jazz bar he ran in Tokyo in the 1970s before becom­ing a writer. But each fan builds their own kind of mon­u­ment to the author of Nor­we­gian Wood, Hard-Boiled Won­der­land and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle, and oth­er nov­els with a sen­si­bil­i­ty all their own. The Muraka­mi-heads (or per­haps Haruk­ists) at Van­cou­ver-based stu­dio Bit Byterz have cho­sen to pay elab­o­rate trib­ute to Muraka­mi by recre­at­ing his uncan­ny world with an adven­ture game called Mem­o­ran­da.

You may remem­ber this project from when we fea­tured its Kick­starter dri­ve back in 2015. Bit Byterz end­ed up rais­ing about $20,000, enabling them to release Mem­o­ran­da this year. You can buy it on Steam, or first view the launch trail­er above and get a sense of what The Verge’s Andrew Web­ster describes as a game “inspired in large part by Murakami’s sto­ries” which “cen­ters on a young woman in a vague­ly Euro­pean town who has lost her mem­o­ry — she doesn’t even remem­ber her name. (The title, Mem­o­ran­da, refers to the sticky notes she uses to remind her­self of impor­tant things.)” While not a direct adap­ta­tion of any one work of Murakami’s in par­tic­u­lar, its loca­tions, its char­ac­ters, and above all its atmos­phere come drawn from the same — to use a high­ly appro­pri­ate metaphor — well.

“I start­ed with one of his short sto­ries, and grad­u­al­ly added char­ac­ters from oth­er short sto­ries,” lead devel­op­er Sahand Sae­di told Way­point’s John Robert­son. “I tried to bring over the sur­re­al atmos­phere, as well as the lone­ly and strange char­ac­ters from the sto­ries, and hope that the gamer will feel like they are liv­ing in one of these sto­ries while play­ing.” Robert­son describes Mem­o­ran­da as “an adven­ture game in the most tra­di­tion­al sense, in terms of inter­ac­tion and pac­ing. While it might be tak­ing an enlight­ened path to adapt­ing one medi­um into anoth­er, it fol­lows well-trod­den game design routes, and sticks to estab­lished rules. You click on items or pick them up, observe them or inter­act with them, sav­ing key exam­ples to your inven­to­ry for lat­er use in puz­zles that are often abstract in their con­struc­tion.”

And so Mem­o­ran­da at once pays homage to the dis­tinc­tive real­i­ty — or rather unre­al­i­ty — of Murakami’s fic­tion and to the dis­tinc­tive gam­ing expe­ri­ence of point-and-click adven­ture games, the genre that first took shape on home com­put­ers in the 1980s and pro­duced the likes of Mani­ac Man­sion, the King’s Quest series (not to men­tion all of Sier­ra On-Line’s oth­er Quests), the Mon­key Island series, and Myst. More recent­ly it has under­gone some­thing of a renais­sance thanks to crowd­fund­ing ser­vices like Kick­starter, ever since respect­ed point-and-click adven­ture game design­er Tim Schafer raised $3.45 mil­lion to fund 2015’s Bro­ken Age. Bit Byterz may have had only a small frac­tion of that bud­get to work with, but they know, as every avid Muraka­mi read­er knows, that mere mon­ey can’t buy uncan­ni­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In Search of Haru­ki Muraka­mi: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Japan’s Great Post­mod­ernist Nov­el­ist

An Intro­duc­tion to the World of Haru­ki Muraka­mi Through Doc­u­men­taries, Sto­ries, Ani­ma­tion, Music Playlists & More

New Video Game Inspired by 20 Haru­ki Muraka­mi Sto­ries Is Com­ing Your Way: Help Kick­start It

Read 5 Sto­ries By Haru­ki Muraka­mi Free Online (For a Lim­it­ed Time)

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Back in grade school, I got into the genre of com­put­er games known as “graph­ic adven­tures,” nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ences — and often quite elab­o­rate ones — through which the play­er guides the pro­tag­o­nist with points and clicks: games like Mani­ac Man­sion, Space Quest, Mean Streets, Zak McCrack­en and the Alien Mind­ben­ders. In col­lege I got into the writ­ing of Haru­ki Muraka­mi, the inter­na­tion­al super­star of Japan­ese lit­er­a­ture spe­cial­iz­ing in the kind of sto­ries that, in his words, have under­gone “a kind of mag­i­cal bap­tism to link the world on this side with the world on the oth­er side.” More recent­ly, I’ve cul­ti­vat­ed an inter­est in projects crowd­fund­ed on plat­forms like Kick­starter. At long last, some­one has come up with a cre­ation that unites all three: Mem­o­randa, a Muraka­mi-inspired graph­ic adven­ture now rais­ing its bud­get on Kick­starter.

“Three years ago I sat down with a friend to brain­storm for mak­ing a game,” writes one of Mem­o­ran­da’s devel­op­ers. Murakami’s work “had inspired us pro­found­ly and we thought that the vague, sur­re­al­is­tic real­i­ty of his fic­tion­al world would have a great poten­tial for being turned into some­thing visu­al and could lead to the cre­ation of odd char­ac­ters, an essen­tial ele­ment in game design.” This led to a “script inspired by more than 20 sto­ries by Muraka­mi” involv­ing a lit­tle town (which has “Euro­pean-like archi­tec­ture but that does­n’t mean it belongs to some­where in Europe”) “where there are both lap­tops and bam­boo water clocks,” a cast of char­ac­ters from “a WWII sur­viv­ing sol­dier to an ele­phant tak­ing shel­ter in a man’s house hop­ing to become human,” and a pro­tag­o­nist “who lit­tle by lit­tle real­izes she is for­get­ting her own name.”

Kick­starter has proven a viable financ­ing medi­um for a new wave of graph­ic adven­ture games, some of them by the cre­ators of the old wave: Tim Schafer, known for Mani­ac Man­sion’s beloved sequel Day of the Ten­ta­cle, raised $3.3 mil­lion for what would become Bro­ken Age, and Space Quest mas­ter­minds Scott Mur­phy and Mark Crowe more recent­ly reunit­ed to raise over $500,000 for SpaceVen­ture. Mem­o­ran­da, by com­par­i­son, requires no more than a shoe­string, and, with ten days to go in its fund­ing dri­ve, it has already raised more than the $13,695 request­ed by Bit Byterz, its Van­cou­ver-based Iran­ian devel­op­ers (how’s that for a demon­stra­tion of Murakami’s glob­al appeal?). But you can still con­tribute at its Kick­starter page, and as a reward could get a copy of the game, its sound­track, a dig­i­tal art book, or even — enthu­si­asts of Muraka­mi tropes, take note — the inclu­sion of your own cat in the sto­ry. No game com­pa­ny ever offered me that in grade school.

You can watch a trail­er for Mem­o­ran­da above.

via Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In Search of Haru­ki Muraka­mi: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Japan’s Great Post­mod­ernist Nov­el­ist

Haru­ki Murakami’s Advice Col­umn (“Mr. Murakami’s Place”) Is Now Online: Read Eng­lish Trans­la­tions

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Dis­cov­er Haru­ki Murakami’s Adver­to­r­i­al Short Sto­ries: Rare Short-Short Fic­tion from the 1980s

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

William S. Bur­roughs, like Christo­pher Walken, has one of those voic­es that casts any­thing he reads in a new light. No mat­ter who the author, if Bur­roughs reads it, the text sounds like one more mis­sive from the Inter­zone. In 1995, Bur­roughs took on the mas­ter of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, read­ing “The Masque of the Red Death” and the poem Annabel Lee for a lit­tle known PC game called The Dark Eye.

Ignored dur­ing its release, the game has since gained cult sta­tus, and playthroughs can be found on YouTube (see below). Sim­i­lar in style to Myst, play­ers point and clicked their way through three nar­ra­tives based on Poe sto­ries, with lit­tle inter­ac­tion. In the end it was more about mood and design, and the creep of Bur­roughs’ drawl. (He also voiced the old man char­ac­ter in the game.)

Accom­pa­ny­ing Bur­roughs’ read­ing was a slideshow that popped up in the mid­dle of the game, with art direct­ed (and pos­si­bly drawn) by Bruce Heav­in, best known these days as the co-founder of Lynda.com. Thomas Dol­by com­posed the gloomy sound­track. The Dark Eye was the sec­ond game from Inscape, which debuted with the equal­ly ambi­tious Bad Day on the Mid­way, a game fea­tur­ing weird music giants The Res­i­dents. Two years after The Dark Eye, the sort of CD-ROM games the com­pa­ny made fell behind due to advances in tech­nol­o­gy, and the fall of the house of Inscape came inevitably in 1997.

The Inter­net con­tin­ues to exca­vate what’s left of these bound­ary push­ing games, and for those who want an audio ver­sion of “Masque”, an mp3 can be enjoyed here.

via WFMU blog

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

William S. Bur­roughs on Sat­ur­day Night Live, 1981

Iggy Pop Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ry, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

We’ve told you about a fair few vin­tage video games that you can play free online. Here’s anoth­er one to add to your col­lec­tion.

Back in 1985, Dou­glas Adams teamed up with Info­com’s Steve Meret­zky to cre­ate an inter­ac­tive fic­tion video game based on The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy. Designed before graph­ic-inten­sive video games real­ly hit their stride, the orig­i­nal Hitch­hik­er’s Guide game (watch an unbox­ing above) was played with text com­mands on the Apple II, Mac­in­tosh, Com­modore 64, CP/M, DOS, Ami­ga, Atari 8‑bit and Atari ST plat­forms. And it found instant suc­cess. The adven­ture game sold 400,000 copies, mak­ing it one of the best-sell­ing games of its time, and it was named the “Game Of The Year” by var­i­ous mag­a­zines.

In 2004, the BBC released on its web­site a 20th anniver­sary ver­sion of the game, and then an enhanced 30th anniver­sary ver­sion last year. Before you start play­ing, you will need to reg­is­ter for an account with the BBC, and then you would be wise to read the instruc­tions, which begin with these words:

The game remains essen­tial­ly unchanged and the orig­i­nal writ­ing by Dou­glas Adams remains untouched. It is still played by enter­ing com­mands and press­ing return. Then read the text, fol­low your judge­ment and you will prob­a­bly be killed an inor­di­nate num­ber of times.

Note: The game will kill you fre­quent­ly. If in doubt, before you make a move please save your game by typ­ing “Save” then enter. You can then restore your game by typ­ing “Restore” then enter. This should make it slight­ly less annoy­ing get­ting killed as you can go back to where you were before it hap­pened. You’ll need to be signed in for this to work. You can sign in or reg­is­ter by click­ing the BBCiD icon next to the BBC logo in the top nav­i­ga­tion bar.

You can find some impor­tant game hints here, or watch a walk-through on YouTube here.

Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Back to Bed: A New Video Game Inspired by the Sur­re­al Art­work of Esch­er, Dali & Magritte

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)