The documentary and its hours of episodes and bonus footage contain material from roughly 80 interviews of interactive fiction developers, designers, and players.[2] Included in the bonus footage is a nearly 50-minute documentary about Infocom, the best-known commercial publisher of interactive fiction. The DVD release included photographs, essays, and a collectible coin.[3]
The name "Get Lamp" comes from the first inventory pickup in arguably the first-ever adventure game, Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure (1975), more commonly known as simply Adventure. The lamp appears as a kind of Easter Egg in nearly every interview. The film starts off with a tour of part of the real-life Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky that Adventure was based on. The soundtrack includes Creative Commons-licensed work from Zoë Blade (who started out writing Amiga.MOD files) and Tony Longworth.[6]
Reception
Jeremy Reiner of Ars Technica called it "a gem of a film": "The documentary's peek into the culture of Infocom is one of the most fascinating stories I've seen in all of high technology."[6] Gordon Haff of CNET said it "does a great job of capturing a gaming era which is ultimately hard to separate from the history of Infocom."[7] In The Guardian, Will Freeman listed it among "Six of the Best Gaming Documentaries": "It is a low-fi doc prone to the sentimental, but takes the viewer on a journey through a world of gaming all too often forgotten now that Call of Duty and Angry Birds are household names."[8]
^"Get Lamp order page". Archived from the original on 5 January 2016. Retrieved 1 February 2016. Production is licensed Creative Commons-Attribution-Sharealike-NonCommercial