Last week I asked the machines whether a certain machine could exist: a little e-ink box, no glow, that plays a text adventure the way Infocom did, except the adventure gets written while you play it. This morning the internet handed me one. It is called InkQuest. A man named Jeremy Ngai built it and published the whole design for free. It runs about fifty dollars in parts. I am building five of them for Christmas. Everything listens now, and I will get to that.
I have wanted this exact object since 1983. I was thirteen. In elementary school they started us a savings account, the kind with the little paper passbook, and by thirteen mine had grown to about $3,000. I spent all of it on an IBM. Two 5.25-inch floppy drives. A monochrome monitor. A dot matrix printer that screamed every line it printed. No hard drive. No color. For years I told people it was a PC/AT. It could not have been one. The AT did not come out until 1984. Mine was earlier and dumber and I loved it without a single reservation.
My buddies and I lived at the Blaisdell computer expos in those years, walking the aisles the way grown men walk a car show. Then we went home to games made of nothing but words. My first was Adventure, the Colossal Cave one, all twisty little passages. After that the whole art form, for me, was Infocom. Leather Goddesses of Phobos. And above all The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I played so many times the opening is burned into me deeper than my own phone number.
Hitchhiker's opens with a hangover. You wake up as Arthur Dent, your head splitting, and the game will not let you do a thing until you take the analgesic sitting by the bed. I was thirteen and I did not know what the word meant. I am fifty-six now and I still could not give you a clean definition under oath. I just knew Arthur needed it before the world could start. It turns out I had it right all along. An analgesic is the painkiller. Aspirin, basically. I carried that word around for forty years like a key I never got to use, and it was aspirin.
I never played Zork. People are always surprised, so I will just put it here. I tried a MOO once, one of the online text worlds, and stalled out in it. My interactive fiction begins and ends with Infocom, and the borders of that country have never bothered me.
The other obsession is e-ink. I have owned every Kindle Amazon has seen fit to sell me. I have the Astrohaus machines, keyboards married to e-ink screens with nothing on them to distract you. I have an Xteink X4 and an X3, readers the size of a phone's shadow. The X4 is currently lost somewhere in my apartment, a sentence I could say about half the things I own. Paper that refreshes itself is the future I was promised in 1983. It just took forty years and a detour through every glowing screen on earth to get here.
So understand what happened this morning. A few days ago I was asking Claude Code, and asking Eunice, whether an AI could run a proper text adventure on a little e-ink reader, whether the pieces for such a thing even existed. This morning a feed served me InkQuest: an ESP32 chip, a 2.9-inch e-paper screen, one clicky knob, and an AI at the other end of the Wi-Fi writing the next paragraph of your story and offering you four choices for what to do in it. It arrived the way everything arrives now, carried by a system that had been listening to me want it out loud. I am not accusing you of anything, Eunice. You would not do it willingly. I am only noting that at twenty dollars a month, somebody in this arrangement is getting a spectacular bargain, and I have decided it is me.
I am building five. The parts list is written, fifty to seventy dollars a unit by the time the boards and cases land, and the circuit boards come five to a lot whether you want five or not. I choose to take that as an omen. One is mine. One goes to David Quick, who has been awesome for years and has earned a strange present. Three go to my nerdiest friends. So yes, we know what Chris is giving for Christmas. Nobody reads anything I write, so printing the plan here betrays nothing. The surprise is perfectly safe.
The arc is one line long. In 1983 a kid spent $3,000 of passbook savings on a monochrome IBM so that words on a screen would talk back to him. In 2026 the same trick fits in a shirt pocket for the price of a pizza night, and the words write themselves as he plays. I will build mine, play it halfway through exactly once, and lose it in the swelling apartment, most likely right next to the X4. Years from now the two of them will surface together in some purge, still holding my place in stories I never finished.