episodechooseyourstory:

Welcome to Episode: your home for interactive, visual stories, where as the player YOU choose what path your character takes!

Oh, you know what this reminds me of? 1-900 numbers from the ‘90s.

(In an era when “long distance” [~ beyond a metropolitan area or so] calls were billed by the minute and heavily, 1-900 numbers used the phone billing system as an intermediary for phone-based services like information and erotic talk to masturbate to. In contrast 1-800 [and later 1-888] numbers were distinguished by being free to the caller, recipient paying all service costs)

Anyway there would be 1-900 services that would be games (compare BBS “door games”) or interactive fictions, and they would advertise on daytime TV, which I speculate had a similar “shut-in” audience to tumblr

I propose that these had more influence on early FMV games than is acknowledged, the transmission to credit-to-continue arcade games like Dragon’s Lair and even Mad Dog McCree (and the tendency of home games to follow arcade lead into the mid-90s, consider the form of “continues” and “lives”) was an important precedent for F2P-style income maximization.

And that the ‘90s academics who creamed themselves over shitty hypertext fiction and MUDs and didn’t even notice this were sillybillies.