‘1893’ has history, mystery
New text video game takes you inside Chicago’s World’s Fair

By Nick Wadhams
Associated Press

NEW YORK—So consumed was Peter Nepstad by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that he spent four years of nights and weekends programming its every facet into a computer game.

The result is 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, whose idea is surprisingly rare for computer games—the meticulous recreation of a real place, down to the smallest detail.

That Nepstad, who made the game entirely by himself, brought the fair so vividly to life is an achievement more impressive because there is not a single piece of animation or motion-capture video in the game.

A World’s Fair Mystery is a text adventure.

Computer gamers usually fall into two camps when it comes to so-called “interactive fiction.” There are those who wistfully remember it as the greatest symbol of gaming’s promise back in the early 1980s, the single-celled organism at the start of an evolutionary chain still unmatched for its simple elegance.

And then there are gamers who revile it as a tedious, obtuse, stupid frustration whose creators seemed intent on driving gamers into conniptions of fury.

A World’s Fair Mystery, thankfully, inspires more feelings associated with the former category. You play a detective on the trail of a diamond thief. But the real character here, and the real story, is the fair itself.

The only graphics you’ll get are still photos that date from the fair, an event that for its time produced something unseen anywhere in the world. It was an amalgam of architectural styles and oddities from the then-exotic lands of Asia and Africa, and above all a testament to the rising might of America and Chicago.

Nepstad’s job of re-creating the fair was formidable, but also easy because the fair was documented extensively with what was then a groundbreaking new technology; Kodak’s portable camera.

Whoever catalogued the fair was about as meticulous as Nepstad: There are pictures of every sculpture, exhibition hall, fake village, restaurant and pathway, and Nepstad has included it all.

The pictures provide an exact and rustic feel to the game without robbing your imagination of room to roam over a world that exists almost entirely inside your head.

It’s tough not to like, partly because the puzzles are generally logical and unobtrusive. I got the most delight just wandering around, taking a tour programmed into the game, looking at every possible object and reading the bountiful description of each.

Every time I did so, I marveled even more at how much passion Nepstad put into the game. A technical writer, he said he has long been fascinated by the World’s Fair—fascinated enough to make the game and distribute it on his own nickel. Copies are available on his website for $19.95.

A World’s Fair Mystery suffers a few of the old text adventures’ faults.

They went extinct in part because it was easy to get lost unless gamers meticulously drew out maps of the game world. A rare few players found that enjoyable; the rest quickly fled to the far more navigable graphic adventures that had begun appearing in force.

But nitpicking with 1893 seems profane.

A car lover wouldn’t, for example, complain that a 1968 Ford Fairlane gets worse mileage than his new Toyota Prius, or doesn’t protect urban cowfolk as well as the Hummer H2.

A World’s Fair Mystery proves convincingly that the best games aren’t about razzle-dazzle special effects or cheap gimmickry. They’re about story, character, and especially here—location, location, location.

Nepstad’s creation is a wonderful journey back to the heady, early days of gaming, when the best titles, though they could fit on a floppy disk, painted beautiful pictures with words.

Don’t fret about system requirements. “I haven’t actually been able to locate a computer on which it wouldn’t run,” Nepstad said.