Home | Profile - Edit | Your Page | Your Inbox Browse | Search Games   |   Log In

Download



photo201.zip *
Contains photo201.blb
For all systems. To play, you'll need a glulx interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.
photopia.z5
For all systems. To play, you'll need a Z-Machine Interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.
photopia.z5
Competition version
For all systems. To play, you'll need a Z-Machine Interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.
bug.txt
Way to avoid a bug in the competition release
fotopia.z5
Spanish version.
For all systems. To play, you'll need a Z-Machine Interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.
photobw.z5
black and white version
For all systems. To play, you'll need a Z-Machine Interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.
ACgames.zip *
Contains PHOTOPIA.PRC
converted to PalmOS .prc file
Palm OS Application (PalmOS low res devices and later)
photopia.exe
MS-DOS Application
photopia.sol
Walkthrough
* Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to downloadable files
All updates to this page

Photopia

by Adam Cadre profile

Slice of life
1998

Web Site

(based on 195 ratings)
10 member reviews

About the Story

1st place, 1998 comp

Game Details

Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: October 1, 1998
Current Version: 2.01
License: Freeware
Development System: Inform 6
Baf's Guide ID: 255
IFIDs:  ZCODE-1-991220-0079
ZCODE-1-980913-2583
ZCODE-1-980914-042C
GLULX-1-020323-AFB0065A
ZCODE-1-981224-9651
TUID: ju778uv5xaswnlpl

Awards

Nominee, Best Game; Winner, Best Writing; Winner, Best Story; Nominee, Best NPCs; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee, Best Individual NPC; Nominee, Best Use of Medium - 1998 XYZZY Awards

1st Place overall; 1st Place, Miss Congeniality Awards - 4th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (1998)

Editorial Reviews

Baf's Guide


Scenes from a handful of ordinary lives alternate with chapters of a child's colorful science-fantasy. Sweet and sad, and complex enough that you may need to go through it twice in order to fully understand how all the fragments fit together. Very story-driven, with menu-based conversations and virtually no puzzle content. My only complaint is that it isn't terribly interactive - indeed, you're practically driven through it on tracks, and any actions that you don't take tend to be rendered unnecessary. But the story is intriguing enough, and well-written enough, and moving enough, that this seems a small quibble. This is probably the most successful example I've seen of interactivity at the service of fiction, rather than vice versa.

The author intended this game to be played with colored text. Although I normally dislike such things, I agree that it works in this case. A monochrome version is also provided for those who feel differently.

(NB: The first release of this game credits Opal O'Donnell as the author. This was a deliberate deception on the part of the real author, carried out with the permission of the real Opal O'Donnell.)

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

Play This Thing
Photopia made me cry.

That's not something I say often. I don't think any other work of art has ever affected me to the extent that Photopia has.
See the full review

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

The colors, like everything else in Photopia, worked beautifully, adding artfully to the overall impact of the story. The work is interactive in other important ways as well. In fact, in many aspects Photopia is a metanarrative about the medium of interactive fiction itself. Again, it wasn't until the end of the story that I understood why it had to be told as interactive fiction. And again, to explain the reason would be too much of a spoiler. I have so much more I want to talk about with Photopia, but I can't talk about it until you've played it. Go and play it, and then we'll talk. I promise, you'll understand why everyone has been so impatient. You'll understand why I loved it, and why I think it's one of the best pieces of interactive fiction ever to be submitted to the competition.
See the full review

Necessary Games
Photopia: Not a Mediocre Short Story
Does Photopia deserve to be so hallowed as it is? Quantitatively, that question may be hard to tackle. In my mind, though, the game does, without a doubt, deserve to be hallowed to some degree. It is historically important both as a work of interactive fiction and as a game, for its numerous technical innovations, and for its minimalist interactive component that makes it such a great example of a “limiting case game.” Whether Photopia succeeds on the affective level is open for debate, but my opinion and your opinion notwithstanding, the fact that it clearly does succeed with so many people is a strong testament to Adam Cadre’s ability to innovate and impact all in the same breath.
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)
(Log in to add your own tags)

Member Reviews

5 star:
(110)
4 star:
(60)
3 star:
(17)
2 star:
(7)
1 star:
(1)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 10
Write a review


Most Helpful Member Reviews


10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Canonical, October 21, 2007
This is a work so hugely influential to IF development that anyone interested in the history of the form should try it: it experiments with non-linear presentation of time, menu-based conversation, and constrained game-play to support a specific plot. A number of its features look perfectly ordinary now, but were ground-breaking at the time. Photopia's particular form of menu conversation, for instance, was spun off into a library used in a number of other works.

How well does it work, beyond that? Opinions vary. Some people consider it the most moving piece of IF they've ever tried. I personally found it wavered between effective and manipulative, with the main character too saintly to be true. While it was worth playing, it is by no means my favorite piece of character-oriented IF story-telling.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Not quite the masterpiece it's often touted as, but still well worth playing, April 11, 2008
by Jimmy Maher (Aalborg, Denmark)
This is easily one of the half-a-dozen or so most important games of the modern IF era. Importance does not always equate directly with quality, however. I played it again recently out of a desire to know how it holds up a decade later.

Well, it still plays reasonably well, although it's by no means without problems. Most of the complaints one can level at the game have been discussed ad nauseum by this point: it is minimally interactive (often little more than a short story with occasional > prompts), absolutely linear, and offers its player no plot agency whatsoever. Just the idea of a puzzleless work was quite bold in 1998; in 2008, it's old hat, and thus Photopia must completely live or die on the strength of its story.

That story is a pretty good one, but doesn't move me to the extent it does some others. From a purely literary perspective, it's a bit heavy-handed and emotionally manipulative. Alley, the teenage girl at its emotional core, is more of a sentimentalized geek wish-fufillment fantasy ("She's beautiful and charming and she likes science!") than a believable character. Still, and even if Cadre's literary reach exceeds his grasp a bit, the story is head and shoulders above the sort of fantasy or sci-fi pastiche that still marks most IF even today. And there is one moment when the story and gameplay come together beautifully, a moment that still stands for me as one of the most magical in all IF: that perfect guess the verb puzzle in the crystal maze.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
"Momento" as Interactive fiction, January 13, 2008
by somegirl (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
I'm not a big fan of "puzzle-less" games, but I did enjoy this game. Really, I'd have to say it was more like a short story than a game, but it was quite a *good* short story. I'd encourage anyone who plays it to settle in to do some reading, and talk to everyone you can - this is not the time to go rushing to the end. I especially liked seeing the plot lines weave together, it starts out quite disjointed, but everything fits together so snugly by the end, it takes your breath away a bit.

Serious spoilage (really, don't click if you haven't played yet)
(Spoiler - click to show) The really Wow! part for me? In the crystal labyrinth, when you discover you can fly - amazing. That was great.

See All 10 Member Reviews

If you enjoyed Photopia...

Related Games

Other members recommend these games for people who like Photopia, or gave both high ratings:

All Roads, by Jon Ingold
"Wave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise." [--blurb from Competition Aught-One]

Vicious Cycles, by Simon Mark

Sarvegne, by Eric Forgeot and Maryam Gousheh-Forgeot (graphics)

Suggest a game

Recommended Lists

Photopia appears in the following Recommended Lists:

My favorite games by Paolo Lucchesi
A brief list of the games I've liked, and I would recommend to another player

Stuff I like by markm
Really, just some stuff I like

Either Interesting or Emotionally Involving by Mark Jones
Works that have either broken conventional IF rules to some degree and have successfully gotten away with it (in my opinion), or involved a good storyline. Coincidentally, these types of games happen to be my favorite games.

See all lists mentioning this game

Polls

The following polls include votes for Photopia:

Artistic Games by WriterBob
I'm interested in games that take the fiction of IF to new levels. These are not straightforward, plot driven games. Think instead of games that play like poetry, or games that focus on a character's revelation.

No map necessary by Divide
Pieces which can be fully enjoyed without drawing map, ideally without taking any notes whatsoever. Ones which you could play on a bus, on a break, laying on bed, etc. with nothing but a portable player. Games for which you don't need...

Story-based games by Peter Pears
I'm looking for games with an actual story that develops as the game progresses, with or without twists (too many games have nothing but backstory, or play through only a minimal part of a big story, or the story simply does not develop...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 12 of this page, edited by Dave Chapeskie on 10 August 2010 at 1:23pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item