The Residents: Freak Show

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The Residents: Freak Show is a CD-ROM by The Voyager Company. A few years earlier they had released a similar work based on The Residents entitled Twenty Twisted Questions. [1] The project was spearheaded by James Ludtke. [2]

Critical reception

The Atlantic deemed it one of the most influential early CD-Roms. [3] Wired noted it was "widely hailed as the best CD-ROM ever". [4] PC Mag listed it as one of the top 100 CD-ROM titles. [5] The book Resolution felt the title opened up the "poetic possibilities" of the interactive medium. [6] The Book is Dead deemed it "obscure". [7] The Voyager Company themselves noted the limitations of sound in the medium which had the potential of alienating players. [8] The New York Times felt the game offered the player a chance to view the characters' "sad yet oddly exhilarating lives". [9]

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References

  1. "Twenty Twisted Questions - Historical - The Residents". www.residents.com.
  2. https://binart.eu/freak-show/freak_show_booklet.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  3. "Digital Culture - What Happened to Multimedia?". www.theatlantic.com via the Wayback Machine. Archived from the original on 14 November 2011.
  4. Ginsburg, Lynn (September 1, 1995). "Twin Peaks Meets SimCity". Wired via www.wired.com.
  5. Inc, Ziff Davis (June 27, 1995). "PC Mag". Ziff Davis, Inc. via Google Books.{{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  6. Renov, Michael; Suderburg, Erika (September 2, 1996). Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices. U of Minnesota Press. ISBN   9780816623303 via Google Books.
  7. Young, Sherman (September 2, 2007). The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book. UNSW Press. ISBN   9780868408040 via Google Books.
  8. Inc, Nielsen Business Media (January 29, 1994). "Billboard". Nielsen Business Media, Inc. via Google Books.{{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  9. Redburn, Tom (July 17, 1994). "Profile; He's Finding the Fire, This Time, in Interactive Media". The New York Times.