The 25th Anniversary of Shuteye Town 1999

December 27, 2024

The 25th Anniversary of Shuteye Town 1999

Never thought I’d be doing this, but the clock is ticking and I am no longer in control of a huge work that may suddenly disappear from general public access at any time. It started as a word processing file that discovered spectacular hidden capabilities in Microsoft’s Word 97 software. It was possible to draw images, group individual elements, and attach hyperlinks to other files, enabling an incredibly early prototype of virtual reality. I had been inspired by a videogame named Myst and a savage satirical comic book called Maus to build a heavily hyperlinked image of a storage room containing links to other “rooms” I might build on later to paint a picture of where our whole culture was at the end of the 20th Century.

Click on the pic. All the boxes are clickable. This first drawing took weeks on a slow computer in 1998.

A friend lent me a much more powerful computer. Between then and Christmas 1999, I had “drawn” ~3800 massively interconnected graphic files (including 200K+ words of embedded text) depicting a place called Shuteye 1999. Because it was all code, it required only a little more than 1 Megabyte of storage and could be copied to CD/ROM. I released it for sale on the 31st of December, 1999. After that, the story became complicated. For various reasons the product had to be ported, and the links reproduced, in an HTML version that lost some features of the original but was still largely intact. I created a free website from a free website provider that made up for missing features to a significant degree. Then the website provider switched on a few weeks notice to a monthly fee basis, got acquired, and then became inaccessible for subscription renewal. Now the HTML files are hanging out as an uneditable “page” of a blog website which is no longer supporting the blog in its original format and is largely unusable, except that ST99 is still buried and almost miraculously still accessible there.

Because I don’t want it to die, I am providing piecemeal links on this site to various parts of the whole. Ironically, each of the parts is also connected to the entire work; they just don’t tell you how to get there, only provide you with unlimited travel capability one frame at a time (with the ability to back out of any frame you don’t wish to pursue.)

See the Note below for a summary description of what all is to be found in ST99. Check it out any time you like.

What can I tell you after that intro? Oh. How big it is. 42 subway stations. 35 stores in the mall. Plus working ATMs, vending machines, mini video games you can actually play, a whole bunch of television networks featuring your favorite shows, news, and infomercial stations, and you get to be the star of the show — gender indeterminate J. Doe — with infinite lives (and deaths) while you navigate the very last minute of the 20th Century, all of which is happening simultaneously. Your mission? Figuring out what the hell is going on. At the high school, the university, the airport, the movie theaters, the bookstore, the video store, the hotels, the courts, the police stations and jails, the hospitals, the government, the TV and radio, the Internet, the homes, and the sex lives of absolutely everybody…

Eventually there will be much more content here, much of it on Pages still being formulated in addition to Posts. That means there will be reason for checking back here through time. Most important thing to remember about navigating this vast work? The back button, however it’s configured in your device, is your best friend. You don’t ever have to put yourself into the jaws of death, although death is actually no big deal here unless we’re talking about souls.

Those are your opportunities at this site.. If there’s traffic indicating interest, I’ll post links to some of the trickier parts of this underground city at a later date. Remember, you all have the ability to comment here. I’ll get your comments even if they don’t display on your screen.

As additional incentive to explore, here are three teaser videos and a map I posted at the original HTML website, plus two books spun out of the whole: