The 25th Anniversary of Shuteye Town 1999

 

Never thought I’d be doing this, but the clock is ticking and I am no longer in control of a huge work that may suddenly disappear from general public access at any time. It started as a word processing file that discovered spectacular hidden capabilities in Microsoft’s Word 97 software. It was possible to draw images, group individual elements, and attach hyperlinks to other files, enabling an incredibly early prototype of virtual reality. I had been inspired by a videogame named Myst and a savage satirical comic book called Maus to build a heavily hyperlinked image of a storage room containing links to other “rooms” I might build later to paint a picture of where our whole culture was at the end of the 20th Century. Which is still starkly relevant.

All the boxes were clickable. This first drawing took weeks in a slow computer in 1998.

A friend lent me a much more powerful computer. Between then and Christmas 1999, I had “drawn” ~3800 massively interconnected graphic files (including 200K+ words of embedded text) depicting a place called Shuteye 1999. Because it was all code, it required only a little more than 1 Megabyte of storage and could be copied to CD/ROM. I released it for sale on the 31st of December, 1999. After that, the story became complicated. For various reasons the product had to be ported, and the links reproduced, in an HTML version that lost some features of the original but was still largely intact. I created a free website from a free website provider that made up for missing features to a significant degree. Then the website provider switched on a few weeks notice to a monthly fee basis, got acquired, and then became inaccessible for subscription renewal. Now the HTML files are hanging out as an uneditable “page” of a blog website which is no longer supporting the blog in its original format and is largely unusable, except that ST99 is still buried and almost miraculously still accessible there.

Because I don’t want it to die, I am providing piecemeal links on this post to various parts of the whole. Ironically, each of the parts is also connected to the entire work; they just don’t tell you how to get there, only provide you with unlimited travel capability one frame at a time (with the ability to back out of any frame you don’t wish to pursue.)

See the Note below for a summary description of what all is to be found in ST99. Check it out any time you like. Here are the links to numerous entry points you can access by clicking on the image provided. You click on objects (people, arrows, discrete spaces or parts of objects) with a mouse or a touch screen. It’s possible to resize the frame, however your device does it, you reach to make links easier to find, Now go play with it; if you get lost anywhere, just come back here…

Your first click on the pic above will take you to the “”Info” kiosk shown here.

To ride the train. Click on the right window of the door. There might be another link too.

There’s more than one car on the Secret Express.

Yes, it’s a labyrinth. Click creatively. You can bail anytime.

If you look for them, you can find tapes and even multiple channels to watch.

HINT: You’re never supposed to breach crime scene tape. This is a pretty vast place.

Go click crazy on campus. Be sure NOT to miss the men’s and women’s dorms and their TV screens.

The real beginning of what was conceived as a game. Why there’s an early test of your perseverance.

Those are your choices for now. If there’s traffic indicating interest, I’ll post links to some of the trickier parts of this underground city at a later date. Remember, you all have the ability to comment here. I’ll get your comments even if they don’t display on your screen. 

As additional incentive to explore, here are two teaser videos and a map I posted at the original HTML website, plus two books spun out of the whole:

THE MAP OF SHUTEYE TOWN

NOTE: The brief description promised above, cribbed from a larger site still in development…

“ What can I tell you after that intro? Oh. How big it is. 42 subway stations. 35 stores in the mall. Plus working ATMs, vending machines, mini video games you can actually play, a whole bunch of television networks featuring your favorite shows, news, and infomercial stations, and you get to be the star of the show — gender indeterminate J. Doe — with infinite lives (and deaths) while you navigate the very last minute of the 20th Century, all of which is happening simultaneously. Your mission? Figuring out what the hell is going on. At the high school, the university, the airport, the movie theaters, the bookstore, the video store, the hotels, the courts, the police stations and jails, the hospitals, the government, the TV and radio, the Internet, the homes, and the sex lives of absolutely everybody…”