IF seems to be rarely covered on Youtube so I was wondering about any IF focused Youtube channels.
1 Like
There’s the channel Apple Adventures. Not all the games featured on it are IF but it has a lot of videos that are walkthroughs of all sorts of classic IF for the Apple II and Macintosh platforms.
3 Likes
Victor Gijsbers has an IF-focused youtube channel here. Not very active, but there’s some interesting analyses.
3 Likes
Jay has been playing through Ryan Veeder’s The Little Match Girl games:
2 Likes
IF doesn’t really mesh well with YouTube since you’d basically be looking at static text most of the time.
IF comes across a bit better on audio podcasts if you’re into that. There’s not a lot of activity at present but there is a backlog of some shows if you’d like to listen:
The Short Game Podcast isn’t just IF but they do review IFComp entries and IF adjacent/adventure titles like Inkle’s Expelled.
Clash does/did audio let’s plays of short IF games with the author reading the text.
Jenni from Clash of the Type-ins also does let’s plays with Riff Conner of some more graphical adventures on YouTube. I just noticed they’re doing Thimbleweed Park which I love and will look into now that I know about it!
3 Likes
!!!
The Retro Adventurers has done 19 episodes in its first year to date. I, at least, feel active in re that total.
There are two basic ways to put something that isn’t especially Visually Stunning (and isn’t a playthrough) on YouTube. One is to feature talking heads, which a number of podcasts which jumped to video have done. The other is to just bang some static images (show logo, game box artwork, etc.) into a video editor.
@TyroneDND, so far I’ve resisted putting Retro Adventurers on YouTube because I feel like then you’re being pulled into the YouTube Ecosystem which is rather different and affects the way you get the word out. But I’m open to arguments on that front.
3 Likes
Good to know that! I’ve subscribed to a couple IF podcasts only to watch them go silent, at least for new episodes. I know Clash isn’t formally dead and Jenni and Ryan could do an episode whenever they feel like it. Grue is specifically about Infocom and there are a finite number of those games.
I wonder if there would be any amusement or utility putting some of the Club Floyd transcripts through text to speech and basically making quasi audio-books of them. It’d be fun if the commenters had different voices like a DVD commentary track that could be turned off if desired.
Similarly, I would totally listen to - say the Counterfeit Monkey Let’s Play on here if it were @DeusIrae 's voice alternating with text-to-speech for the game transcript. It would probably come across kind of like The Beginner’s Guide.
3 Likes
This search is far from perfect, but BogusMeatFactory and his friend did IF for a while: https://www.youtube.com/@bogusmeatfactorystream/search?query=Interactive%20Fiction
And a friend of Charm Cochran’s has played a bunch of his games: https://www.youtube.com/@NateAtNight17/search?query=Charm%20Cochran
2 Likes
The idea of being able to listen to people commenting on a game interspersed with narration of the game itself could be entertaining if done well. I think you’d need people who knew what they were getting into though - both in terms of consent and also because I think you’d get much more interesting commentary if they were at least passively aware that it’s being performed for an audience.
2 Likes
Definitely Club Floyd owns those transcripts. I was just thinking about how text-to-speech could assist in making an audio LP using the player’s personal transcript and prevent the human from having to read all the game text, and naturally help distinguish between game text and what the player is commenting.
1 Like
That’s not the case, they have several episodes on non-Infocom games.
1 Like