It Is Pitch Black

Inspired by Will Crowther’s inaugural text-based adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure (1975), Nintendo’s graphical action-adventure, The Legend of Zelda (1986), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s transmedial novel, House of Leaves (2000), It is Pitch Black is a “text-based action-adventure” game combining the text parsers of interactive fiction with the polygonal collision of 3D navigable space. It Is Pitch Black features a non-visual environment illuminated not by lamp, but by the quickly scrolling debugger log of recombinant poetry. The speed and scale of output is directly proportional to the speed of the computer running the game and, as such, indexes each of the game’s states while producing recombinant poetry about two women—Pat Crowther and Karen Green—through the voice of “Will,” the conflated author-figure.