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…
That’s how I found my way to Fallen London. Au revoir les rêveurs!
