The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations: The Multimedia Accompaniment to the Print Edition

The Chocolate Box of Death


You are looking at the box in which John McDaid's Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse was packaged. It measures 6.25 by 9.25 inches and is skinned in a shiny black finish and silver lettering that reads "Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse" and “a hypermedia novel by John McDaid”. Inside the box are two audio cassettes; a letter from the editor of Vortex magazine; an essay entitled "Tree"; a registration card—and five 3.5-inch floppy disks. The box and its contents were referred to by the author and his editor, as a "chocolate box of death," since it represents to the player the literary effects of their missing Uncle Buddy. Version 1.0 was published in 1992/3 on HyperCard 2.0 on the floppy disk format and Version 3.0 on CD-ROM later that same year by Eastgate Systems, Inc. An emulated version of the digital files produced in 2018, Version 3.0, runs in the Mini vMac environment and can be found at the Internet Archive. It does not reference the physical media associated with the work; however, Version 4.0, a web-based reconstruction of the work produced in 2023, incorporates the physical media as playable elements and references them in its archival site.

 

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