Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse

What happened to Arthur “Uncle Buddy” Newkirk?

As a science fiction writer, Newkirk’s hard drive is a playground where ideas were explored and developed, leaving the player never quite sure about what is true. The “story” is embedded within both the text and the design of the objects the player encounters––including a sketchbook, a dictionary, a photo album, a compendium of lyrics––making it very much open to personal interpretation.

Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, created by science fiction writer John McDaid, is a hypermedia novel and game built on the HyperCard 2.0 platform and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1992/93. Unlike works of other hypertext literature the company released, Funhouse was distributed in a box containing five 3.5-inch floppy disks, two musical cassette tapes, page proofs of a short story written by Arthur Newkirk entitled “Tree,” and a letter from an editor of Vortex magazine to Buddy Newkirk about the page proofs. At the heart of the story is a mystery: All of these artifacts comprise what is left of the literary estate of Arthur “Buddy” Newkirk. You, the reader, are left to solve the mystery of who “Uncle Buddy” is and what happened to him––and you must sleuth through the digital funhouse on your computer screen and physical artifacts you hold in your hands to answer these questions.

The eight students from the Web Design & Development Team recreating the game were tasked with maintaining the integrity of the gameplay––that is, an exploration-driven narrative that gives the reader/player complete control over their engagement with the text. They also were required to reconstruct Funhouse in open web languages (HTML5, CSS3, JS); no 3rd party plugins allowed. Additionally, all code had to be human-readable and human-accessible. No DRM, no minified JS, no hidden files. The player should never be asked to think of themselves as doing anything other than what they actually are: sitting in front of a contemporary screen, interacting with familiar digital objects. There are ludic elements (a puzzle to solve, a password to guess), but the majority of the interaction takes the form of reading, listening, navigating, and making inferences. Anything players can do in the web at large (follow links, view source, check mp3 tags) should work exactly the same here: if they know how to explore something, their efforts should not be frustrated.

Learn more about the project on our website.