Stephen King's F13 | A Forgotten Stephen King PC Game or The World's First eBook?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 16 окт 2024
- A bad PC game, or a great eBook? The world’s first mass-market eBook was Stephen King's Riding the Bullet, published by Simon & Schuster in 2000. But in 1999, Presto Entertainment and Blue Byte published Stephen King's F13. An interactive CD-ROM featuring Everything’s Eventual.
Stephen King’s F13 was a digital copy of the short story Everything’s Eventual, packaged with a bunch of CD-ROM content as a value-added offering. F13 is the critical mass of everything about this channel. Peak CD-ROM era and mainstream horror.
Too many Stephen King's F13 reviews rag on F13 for being a bad PC game. But F13 isn’t a PC game. This is software, which aims to blur the lines between traditional book publishing and electronic entertainment. It's pushing the boundaries of digital entertainment. It's experimental. If nothing else, this makes Stephen King's F13 a landmark in ebook history. What was the first ebook? Stephen King's F13. This weird old CD-ROM from 1999.
Footnote:
The books sales of The Plant are conjectured on the basis that the first book sold 120,000 copies and the fifth 50,000. I drew a linear path between these two figures.
#ebook #stephenking #stoked
Sources:
www.sfadb.com/S...
news.bbc.co.uk/...
abcnews.go.com...
www.newyorker....
www.theguardia...
editingeveryth...
www.vice.com/e...
lithub.com/her...
www.statista.c...
en.wikipedia.o...
💙 Support the channel by joining Delta Squad:
www.youtube.co...
👕👚 You can also support the channel by buying Game Show merch!
teespring.com/...
Follow us on social media:
🐦 thegameshowuk
😐 thegameshowuk
📷 thegameshowuk
🌐 www.thegameshow.co.uk
Thumbs up who remembers when you could get big CDs of screensavers on the spinner in Currys
Matty, these damn videos are made so well for something that you seem to do on the side. It's clear how much enjoyment you get out of the subject matter and the actual creation of the video itself!
Great thought piece, can't say I'm a massive fan of king myself but I may just have to give him another go after this. If I remember rightly, it was King who saw a cockroach crawl into his computer and got so freaked he didn't write for months. I'm not surprised he's sceptical of technology if that sort of thing happens to him!
Love the fact the Christmas tree is out already by the way!
Keep being awesome. Love the videos and hopefully going to continue my catch up of the back catalogue tomorrow!!
Dan, your support over the last year has been immense. You approach my videos in the same way I make them: open minded, curious and not too seriously. You're right, I love making these l videos, and that's why I do it! And support like yours is absolutely the best thing about it.
Re: Stephen King. I'm a lifelong fan. Depending on what you like to read, I bet I could recommend at least two books that you'd like.
If you haven't already, jump on the Discord and come chat with the gang! It would be great to have you.
@@MattyStoked I'll do just that sometime
Ok, but you using old cartoons to tell that story was really wild and blew me away. Love your recent looks at super 90s themed software
Thank you! I've been wanting to use old public domain footage in my edits for a while and was waiting for the opportunity. Trying to talk about a book without any visual aids was just that. And thanks again, I'm becoming obsessed with this era of technology. Digital and analogue existing side by side, pre web 2.0. It's a fascinating time.
Everything's Eventual was first published in 1997 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Its appearance on F13 would be the second one.
"Mass-market" tends to mean published in large quantities, in a format which is designed to reach the most people possible
Great video mate! I'd love to see an underground return of this sort of multimodal storytelling. You could do something really cool using USB sticks filled with different sorts of media all coming together to make some form of narrative.
Thanks mate. Your idea is definitely more well thought-out than this! I'd dig it. I love those books that make you work a little bit, and the interactive format could have given us some really interesting ideas. What about a Kindle book that whenever you go back, it's slightly different? You could really creep people out with that.
I vaguely remember this being talked about way back when. Strange how time flies.
It got loads of positive reviews in the press at the time, too. Possibly paid, as the book industry is famous for that. But it's still a fascinating product.
@@MattyStoked Yes. As a king fan myself, I appreciate you archiving this cool piece of Internet history. 👍😺
@@Phreno_Xeno fellow Constant Reader here, too. One of my first true loves.
@@MattyStokedSame here. I got started borrowing my elder sister's copies of Night Shift, and Salem's Lot as a kid. I've read other horror author's since, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but King's work is closest to my heart. Something about his characters and build up/pay off. He's like the modern equivalent of the old man telling stories by the campfire imo.
I used to read my mum's! King's early work owes a lot to earlier American authors like Lovecraft and Poe. Night Shift is a great example of this. But you're right, one thing Lovecraft was not good at was creating compelling characters. As King has matured, his writing still feels authentic. Which is hard to say for authors younger than him.
The plot sounds quite similar to Death Note.
I thought the same. There are functional differences in how it all works but it's pretty similar. Other than the fact that Light is a straight crazy villain!
@@MattyStoked There's a one off sequel story to what happens to the Death Note after Light's reigeme, and it falls into Donald Trump's hands (not a joke and ti's an official story!)
I read a lot of King but never heard of F13 until I read a review today that was just bashing the minigames and barely mentioned the short story. So I looked it up and found this video. What a totally different perspective. And much more interesting :)
Thank you so much. I tries to looking at this for what I think it was intended to be. Understanding it with context revealed it to be something far more special than a lot of negative reviews would let you believe. Thank you for the comment. This was a special video for me and I'm happy to see it reaching its intended audience.
Pretty neat, if this can really be considered the first ebook. I always thought there must have been something in the 80s already, with all the text adventures being quite popular, etc.
There were books released on floppies. But they were expensive for the time so were released in small numbers. Very specialist stuff.
I got a copy of F13 from a charity shop. I think I paid 99p.
An absolute BARGAIN! I paid a few quid more for mine, but you can't honestly go wrong for a quid, can you? A little piece of history, there :)
I loved your video. Thanks. I have my copy of F13 sitting here beside me. I got it back in 1999 and loved it, but it's been many years since I've had anything to play it on. Such a shame. I'd love to revisit it. If you or anyone wants my copy, please let me know.
Thanks so much for the kind comment! I'm glad you enjoyed the video. It's certainly a unique piece of history :) If you'd like to play it on a modern PC, I have a tutorial on how to set up a virtual (emulated) Windows 95 PC on a modern computer. I even tried it with F13 and it worked flawlessly!
@@MattyStoked Hi Matty. Thanks for the offer of a tutorial but I've only got a chromebook now. There's not a lot you can do with it. I enjoyed the bit of nostalgia you gave me. My husband and I used to have lots of giggles playing the bug splat game. I was never a gamer but it didn't stop me enjoying that.
May the Algorithm grant you the views this video deserves!
Can't believe it only has 330 at the time of this comment.
Thank you so much for saying, and thank you for your recent comments. This one will sit and slow-cook for years I'm sure. These types of things rely on word of mouth more than anything, as it's so niche!
@@MattyStoked Well, I just wanted to add that I feel your whole channel should have more views, as this format of content has been very hot this past year or so, plus with this video in particular, it's covering an unknown topic from a known source, you know what I mean?
For instance, I, myself, am a Constant Reader of Sai King's work, but I have somehow never heard of this particular piece of software. This "trope" of "Hey you know that famous person? Here's a piece of their body of work/discography that you've probably never heard of" is really popular with the algorithm, so I imagine when this channel is discovered, this will be the video that gets the ball rolling.
Best of luck to you!
@@RedSpade37 Feel free to share! That's how the channel will get discovered :D