History of John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse
McDaid was actively engaged on early versions of the Funhouse in 1987. In the summer of 1988 he took part in a summer writing/game design workshop at Humboldt State College in California, where several young writers and designers collaborated with the hypermedia author Rob Swigart on a hybrid game/novel based in HyperCard. The project was never completed, but McDaid gained crucial technical and aesthetic insights from the experience. He also acquired the mantra, "This is not a game," repeated prominently in the Funhouse.
In 1990, McDaid demonstrated an early draft of the Funhouse in an experiment in critical reception of hypertext led by Nancy Kaplan, then the Director of the Writing Workshop at Cornell University. Through Kaplan, McDaid became acquainted with Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop, who would join McDaid and Jane Douglas in the informal circle called TINAC (standing either for "Textuality, Intertextuality, Narrative, and Computers" -- McDaid's reading -- or "This Is Never a Coincidence" -- Moulthrop's).
Eastgate Systems agreed to publish the Funhouse in 1992, at about the same time McDaid was accepted to the Clarion Writer's
Workshop, the distinguished professional seminar for beginning science fiction writers. Production considerations on the notoriously complex project delayed actual release until 1993. The version available from Eastgate in the spring of that year included two cassette tapes, proof pages of a short story, a booklet, and five 3.5-inch diskettes comprising the HyperCard stacks that make up the core of the Funhouse. After diskette drives ceased to be included as standard technology on personal computers, after 2001, Eastgate produced a second edition of the Funhouse with a single CD-ROM replacing the diskettes. Both diskette and CD editions used the distinctive black-and-silver box, sourced from a confectionery supplier and referred to by Mark Bernstein as "a chocolate box full of death."
The Funhouse as briefly discussed by Robert Coover in his controversial "End of Books" front-page essay in the New York Times Book Review in November, 1993. Coover wrote a longer account of the work, also in the Times, the next year. Stuart Moulthrop and Michael Joyce have both written at length about various aspects of the Funhouse. It is a centerpiece of Anja Rau's rejoinder to the "Gutenberg Elegy" school, and part of Espen Aarseth's definitive account of digital literature in "Narrative in the Turing Universe," included in Franco Moretti's The Novel, Volume 2.
Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse is now very hard to access in its original form. In March, 2004, after years of diminishing interest and investment, Apple Incorporated withdrew HyperCard from sale. In October, 2007, with the release of Macintosh OS 10.5 (“Leopard”), Apple ended support for Classic mode, the emulation environment under which HyperCard could still run on newer machines. Subsequent versions do not include Classic. At this writing, the most effective way to read the Funhouse is on a vintage Macintosh computer, as was done for John McDaid's traversal.