As forums stalwarts, I expect some of you will remember StoryNexus!
StoryNexus was our attempt to offer interactive fiction writers a tool for making stories like Fallen London. It didn’t pan out the way we had hoped, and 12 years ago we put StoryNexus into maintenance mode. Now, the time has finally come: on 27th January next year, or shortly afterwards, StoryNexus worlds will go offline.
We’ve kept the small number of playable StoryNexus worlds available as long as we felt we could. Sometimes that has meant quietly doing various sorts of maintenance, but even so, it’s slowly degraded over the years – both as browsers and other online infrastructure changed around it, and because of downstream effects from work we do on Fallen London, the codebase for which StoryNexus is tightly bound to.
Alongside that, people no longer play StoryNexus games very often. Earlier this year, a bug appeared that prevented most people playing them at all, and it took two months for anyone to tell us. We fixed it, but it was at that point we decided it was time to let things go.
Thank you to everyone who made and played a StoryNexus game down the years.
Is there somewhere with a full list of the currently-active worlds? I’d like the chance to give some a spin before they’re gone, but I actually don’t know how to find any of them except for the Silver Tree.
One of my all-time favourite novels! And yes, the game captured its world so beautifully… I think I last played it during Covid, so not that long ago.
If I do find the time, I’ll go in there and take as many screenshots as I possibly can before it disappears forever!
And of course, The Silver Tree… can’t actually believe Failbetter is going to take that down since it’s a part of the Fallen London universe. All those wonderfully-written intricate details about Karakorum, and the Khan, and the Princess need to be preserved somewhere!
Edit: I just realized there’s a Silver Tree wiki! It appears to already be very far along, if not even complete. This makes me so happy!
Only started playing The Silver Tree this year and I think I enjoyed TST better than Fallen London. So I hope FBG will add TST contents into FL (with a bit of mechanical tweaks maybe) and I am even willing to pay Fate for this!
Is there a good source for some of these stories? I played Silver Tree back in the day, but the fact that storynexus appears to be in http rather than https is sort of discouraging me at the log in stage. If there’s a lets play or similar around that would be neat (it’s how I experienced Sunless Skies given my co-ordination issues).
Is there a software-preservation angle to discuss? This came up in IF Archive volunteer chat.
I would imagine that you can’t just make the source of StoryNexus worlds publicly available. (But I am not a lawyer.) Is there a way to poll authors for permission to include their work in an exported dump? I’m imagining the (hypothetical!) possibility of a future “emulator” to make them playable again.
Doesn’t the Internet Archive do this sort of thing? They have a vast collection of old games – I found a fair few text-based games from Infocom, for example, thanks to Jason Scott (Sadofsky). I remember vast maps, painstakingly (and clumsily) drawn by hand…
Oh God, I have to start visiting the forums more regularly.
Could you guys maybe just… pass it off to someone else to maintain? Surely there must be a webdev among your fans willing to take it off your hands? (Hello? Any webdevs here?)
The news actually kind of shocked by, but by sheer coincidence, I had just started building a QBN platform of my own. I since made it open-source, and it’s reaching a relatively stable state, and I have been succesfully porting over The Black Crown Project, with permission from the author. This is the website: https://chroniclehubgames.com/
What I don’t have the capacity (and spoons) to do is reach out to every author before the January 27th deadline, and ask them to preserve their works. So if anyone is or knows any authors, I would like to assist in porting over the content. It hurts to see so much media lost to time, and I hope to contribute any way I can to help preserve it. Which, speaking of:
I know some authors who wanted to, but had difficulty exporting them or reaching out. Is there a legal framework or arrangement wherein I, or the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation could at least archive the data without publishing or sharing it, until permission has been granted by the author, and delete it at the request of authors.
If done at the explicit behest of FBG, I believe there is a legal framework there to handle this, but if possible, I would like to reach out to discuss the legal nitty-gritty of such a construction. I am quite serious about the preservation of interactive fiction and would like to look into options, or even, as @DarioFortschritt proposed, see if I can take over custodianship of StoryNexus in some semi-official capacity, through whatever legal arrangement can be made.
It hurts to see so much creative work be lost otherwise.
Something beautiful has left the world, leaving a little hole where there was once something bright and gleaming. The Night Circus and the other StoryNexus games will be missed.
I still hold out hope for a future public release of the game files and possible adaptions using different game engines.
That’s how I found my way to Fallen London. Au revoir les rêveurs!
