The documentary and its hours of episodes and bonus footage contain material from roughly 80 interviews of interactive fiction developers, designers, and players.2 Included in the bonus footage is a nearly 50-minute documentary about Infocom, the best-known commercial publisher of interactive fiction. The DVD release included photographs, essays, and a collectible coin.3
Get Lamp is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial license.4
Raw interview footage is hosted at the Internet Archive.5
The name "Get Lamp" comes from the first inventory pickup in arguably the first-ever adventure game, Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure (1975), more commonly known as simply Adventure. The lamp appears as a kind of Easter Egg in nearly every interview. The film starts off with a tour of part of the real-life Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky that Adventure was based on. The soundtrack includes Creative Commons-licensed work from Zoë Blade (who started out writing Amiga .MOD files) and Tony Longworth.6
Jeremy Reiner of Ars Technica called it "a gem of a film": "The documentary's peek into the culture of Infocom is one of the most fascinating stories I've seen in all of high technology."7 Gordon Haff of CNET said it "does a great job of capturing a gaming era which is ultimately hard to separate from the history of Infocom."8 In The Guardian, Will Freeman listed it among "Six of the Best Gaming Documentaries": "It is a low-fi doc prone to the sentimental, but takes the viewer on a journey through a world of gaming all too often forgotten now that Call of Duty and Angry Birds are household names."9
Media
Gagne, Ken (26 Jul 2010). "The Grill: Jason Scott". Computerworld.com. Archived from the original on 19 January 2013. Retrieved 8 Aug 2010. https://archive.today/20130119151255/http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/350365/The_Grill_Jason_Scott ↩
"Get Lamp: Interviews". getlamp.com. Retrieved 8 Aug 2010. http://www.getlamp.com/cast/ ↩
Smith, Graham (6 August 2010). "Get Lamp: text adventure documentary". PC Gamer. Retrieved 1 February 2016. http://www.pcgamer.com/get-lamp-text-adventure-documentary/ ↩
"Get Lamp order page". Archived from the original on 5 January 2016. Retrieved 1 February 2016. Production is licensed Creative Commons-Attribution-Sharealike-NonCommercial https://web.archive.org/web/20160105010959/http://getlamp.com/order/ ↩
"The Get Lamp Interview Archives". Retrieved 18 September 2022. https://archive.org/details/getlamp-interviews ↩
"Looking back at the Infocom era: a review of Get Lamp". Ars Technica. 29 September 2010. Retrieved 1 February 2016. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/09/the-great-thing-about/ ↩
Haff, Gordon (10 August 2010). "'Get Lamp' illuminates the text adventure game". Retrieved 1 February 2016. https://www.cnet.com/news/get-lamp-illuminates-the-text-adventure-game/ ↩
Freeman, Will (10 March 2014). "How augmented reality builds bridge between games and children's books". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 February 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/10/augmented-reality-books-video-games ↩