The person behind it
My mother was an old school software engineer from the 70s, hand typing punch cards and writing code in Assembler. I taught myself to code at 8 when her office bought her an IBM PC XT in 1983. She hated PCs (in favor of mainframes) and so I would spend my weekends trapped in her office with nothing to do but figure it out while she worked in the computer room. Within a couple of years, I was building my own text-based adventure games, common for the time, which eventually grew into more complex graphics animations and step-programmed musical scores. My rural WV high school would still be teaching on mechanical typewriters through my graduation, so in 8th grade I enrolled at the local Marshall University at night to study programming while attending middle/high school during the day. At that time, the University didn't even own its own computer, you would purchase compile time from West Virginia University 6 hours away. But it was my first introduction to what would eventually become the internet. Email, which was very novel at the time, and text-based chat with other students logged into the system via monochrome green terminals. I recall secretly logging in over a 300 baud modem from home in my closet where I had set up the suitcase-like 28 lb Compaq Portable system my mother had "borrowed" for me from the sales team with its 9" green monochrome screen and dual 5.25" floppy drives that you manually booted from disk. The connection was so slow that each letter of text would pop onto the screen slowly one after the other. But it was my escape hatch out of a world that seemed to have no place for me.
By the time I graduated high school, what I would call the great epoch, the apex of the pre-commercial internet, had arrived. System administrators would secretly create telnet ports on their business or university systems, getting passed by word of mouth, on which were built enormous text-based Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), extremely simple by today's standards, but at the same time, some of the most imaginative and transformative experiences I've seen to date. MUDs (Multi User Dungeon), MOOs (MUD Object-Oriented), and MUSHs (Multi User Shared Hallucination) were underground havens for personal exploration and consensual roleplay, many years before the first web browser would be introduced (and essentially doom the internet to capitalism). Just simple text descriptions of objects and a room concept connected rhizomatically to any other room, a character appeared as an object in a room that you can LOOK at which then provided the description they had written for that character. Entire cities were recreated, entire fictional worlds, in which many characters schemed and colluded and had every imaginable experience that can be described through words. With no records or mediation. You could try on endless skins. Your future skins. Eventually leading to IRL (In Real Life) connections and a global network of the fleeting computer underground.
Those kinds of text-based experiences are long gone but I still recall them fondly. When I first discovered the ability to wrangle an AI to facilitate this kind of open text exploration, I had to create a system that paid homage to those days and that aesthetic. The boxy scanline terminal, the 8-bit fantasy art. I hope this game brings you the kind of unfettered explorations that I enjoyed as a teenager and in a completely secure and encrypted environment that is nearly impossible in today's world. Exercise that imagination and stretch that mind. See the impossible. Devolving into a world of pictures was certainly a kind of death for the mind. Our capacity is so much greater.