\nWelcome 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 \u201890s.
(In an era when \u201clong distance\u201d [~ 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 \u201cdoor games\u201d) or interactive fictions, and they would advertise on daytime TV, which I speculate had a similar \u201cshut-in\u201d 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\u2019s Lair and even Mad Dog McCree (and the tendency of home games to follow arcade lead into the mid-90s, consider the form of \u201ccontinues\u201d and \u201clives\u201d) 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\u2019t even notice this were sillybillies.
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