JRPG Canon - Endless, Nameless (2013)

So Endless Nameless was written by Adam Cadre, an esteemed writer in the interactive fiction space.

He's been making intfix since the 90s, and his work Photopia, released in 1997, has been voted the number one best work of interactive fiction of all time in a 2015 poll.

And three others of his works were on the same list in the top 50.

In 1996, Cadre was taking a film class and the professor handed out photocopies of a magazine for one lesson.

And the magazine was called Photopia.

And Cadre thought that it was a cool name and he wanted to steal it.

Only he found out that it was just a poor manual photocopy that had cut off the last letter in the bottom of the title.

So the magazine was actually called Photoplay.

So Photopia was free for the taking.

It's not stealing if it's not anybody else's.

He originally attached the title Photopia to a strategy game about colored discs that he was working on, but after watching the movie The Sweet Hereafter, which he then says became one of his favorite movies of all time, he thought that he should make an interactive fiction game that wasn't just about some wacky character on a wacky mission with vague motivations, but something trying to be literary and beautiful.

He also thought that if you released a game like that after his first game, I zero, he could release anything and people wouldn't be able to guess what he was up to in the interactive fiction space from then on.

I zero, uh, also known as interstate zero was a pulpy infix, similar more to exploitation films than to dungeons and dragons.

And, uh, In the years since, he released it anonymously and he's talked about how he has made it before, but he doesn't list it on his website of all of his games because it dealt with a lot of themes that he feels he was just being edgy

for.

So I don't know if that one's still out there to play.

but photopia is a very touching story about like a child telling bedtime stories and stuff and also a lot more but i'm not going to spoil it i also haven't played it but everywhere that i found while i was researching says to go into photopia blind so do that Photopia was inspired by Christopher Priest, quote, not the British one.

So he means Christopher James Priest, the comic book writer.

Priest was known for having nonlinear stories, as in the order of events and the revelation of the story happened nonlinearly.

But because they were all comic books, the story itself was literally linear.

The pages only go in one order.

uh but when you finish the story the out of order storytelling was like the perfect order to learn about the story in and uh and cadre wanted to uh try and capture that magic with photopia but because it's an infant game it would actually be non-linear too and so in 1998 photopia was released and it won several awards at the zizi awards and in 1999 varicella his next work won even more These two works, Cadre says in an unassuming text file on his website that has a Q&A with an interviewer that probably doesn't actually exist.

He says that these two works were released at the right place and at the right time as the medium was moving from a commercial product into an artistic medium.

And he credits that with why they took the world by storm more than their specific quality.

But if you look at the winners of the ZZ Awards before iZero and Photopia and after iZero and Photopia.