Adult Swim: Celeb-Nerdy with MC Frontalot

According to this mystical fortune cookie: "Celebrities are cool, nerds are not, and the No. 5 with prawns might taste funny." We can’t comment on the prawns, but we do take issue with the first two-thirds of that fortune: Sometimes nerds ARE celebrities.

Case in point, nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot. He's been rhymin' about blogs, command prompts, and lasers since before Al Gore invented the Internet, and his nerdy hobby certainly doesn't disappoint: In addition to being a hardcore text-adventure game enthusiast, he's also making one of his own. Since that No. 5 with prawns is taking its sweet time in getting back here, read our chat with Frontalot in the meantime, and scope out some tracks from his latest, Solved.

MC Frontalot – Front the Least

When did your love of text adventures begin?

It started with the Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy game, which convinced me to stop hunting and pecking and learn to type. I was young. This came out in '84, which I was the year I got out of fourth grade and started fifth grade.

And were you playing it because you bought it, or did your parents buy it?

Surely I did not have that much disposable income. Somebody bought it for me. First I played it on some computer of some friend of my mom's. I remember it was a Macintosh, and we never had one of those. It was so fancy-looking because it had variable width type, whereas I was used to doing things on my Commodore 64. I must've gotten a C64 copy. It probably wasn't the first adventure game I played, but it was the first one I got totally obsessed with because I was obsessed with the books. I think before that I played Pyramid 2000 a lot. It was a port of Adventure, the original text-adventure game. It was set in Egypt, but it was the same exact map and puzzles as Adventure. That was on my TR S-80, so that was even before I got a Commodore 64. That was maybe second grade.

But this love for text-adventure games continues to this day, right? Aren't you making your own right now?

Maybe ten years ago, when I got frontalot.com built up from its initial brochure state -- the first real version of frontalot.com I had included the "valued sucker" program, which was making fun of Amazon affiliate programs, things like that. "Oh, you can participate in this thing that makes us money! Aren't you lucky?" mine was called the "valued sucker" program, where you become a sucker who's more valuable to me than the rest of the suckers by giving me money for things that were already available for free on the website. Like I would send you a CD-R of the songs you could already download. I promised all these magical things that would happen in the future if you were a valued sucker. One of them was this text-adventure game that I always wanted to make.

I have been promising this for, like, ten years. In the last couple of years I actually made some headway on it. I found this awesome dude in England who managed to get a bunch of child labor involved in the project. [Laughs.] He's like a computer teacher for grade-school kids and he made some of the initial work on it into a coding project all semester for them. So I've managed to exploit foreign child labor -- mandatory, not voluntary. So [I’m] already well on my way to being an adventure-game industrial tycoon.

MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark

What is the game?

So the game is kinda like the original Adventure, which was a mapping of a real space: colossal cave. That's where these nerds used to go spelunking. After that fashion, it is a very detailed map of my apartment. You play as MC Frontalot, who's sitting around in his apartment using the Internet. [Laughs.] Which is basically what I do all day. The plot is that there's a show that you're supposed to perform this evening and you have to get out of the apartment to get to it on time. But if you try and leave your apartment through the front door you enter the twisting maze of passageways all alike, another adventure-game staple. So getting out through the hallways in front of my building is completely useless. There's no way.

“So getting out through the hallways in front of my building is completely useless. There's no way.”

The only other way out is through the fire escape, but if you go out that way, the superintendent is out there and yells at you for being out there when there isn't a fire. So really the goal of the game is to burn down your apartment so you can get out on time to do your show. But it's really hard to get a hold of a book of matches in your apartment. That leads you on a really colorful quest through the Internet to try to figure out how [to get] a hold of the book of matches that's already in your apartment. Because you're MC Frontalot, the final boss of nerdcore hip-hop, your computer is an extremely fancy computer. Instead of going to websites, it immerses you in them, virtual reality-style. It takes you to another sort of adventure-game location, where you're in this wild and fascinating, new little mini-map. But of course you're just sitting in your apartment using the computer.

I was having my dinner with my mom and Wil Wheaton at Penny Arcade a couple years ago and was talking about how excited I was that British school children were being forced to work on the game. Wil insisted that he be a villain in the game and that the only way to defeat him was to have more coins in hand than he has, which is a reference to a lyric about him in my Penny Arcade theme song. So there's that section: you have to defeat Wil Wheaton by collecting various coins on the Internet.

Penny Arcade Theme Song

What's the game going to be called?

I don't got a title for it yet. I'll have to come up with something extremely evocative. But the maps and the puzzles are all designed, and I think they're about 90 percent implemented, which leaves about 60,000 or 70,000 words of text that I need to put together. [Laughs.] I work on that whenever I am procrastinating on my music career or otherwise trying to get out of doing awesome things that I have deadlines for, because this doesn't have a specific deadline. It's funny to be spending all this time on something that almost nobody is likely to have any interest in. [Laughs.]

“It's funny to be spending all this time on something that almost nobody is likely to have any interest in. ”

Do you still play adventure games to this day, or is this more of an homage to when you used to play?

People do still play adventure games, and in fact the hobbyist community puts out a lot of short-form interactive fiction stuff every year. They have contests for themselves and they release bundles of the best stuff every year. Maybe every other year I will poke through it and try to play a couple of them, but I've never gotten deep into any of the semi-pro or amateur- or hobbyist- generated stuff. I have gone back from time to time to play old Infocom games. I had never gotten very far in Bureaucracy, which was the second Infocom game Douglas Adams wrote in lieu of a Hitchhiker's sequel. I pulled that out and tried to hack my way all the way through it. It is a very difficult and unforgiving adventure game. [Laughs.] And it's funny, it definitely has Douglas Adam's voice in it, but it's also very bitterly depressing. I think he was in a slightly dark place, at least in relationship to the local automobile ministry or whatever standing in line inspired him to write this game.

Exploring Interactive Fiction

From your point of view, do people who grew up playing Gears Of War care about adventure games?

I'm in a position where I end up talking to the "young people" about video games rather frequently. I have not met very many young folks who even know what an adventure game is, or if they have some kind of recognition of the term, they'll be like, "Oh, you mean Monkey Island? I know that retro stuff. My dad showed me Space Quest." Those games were an affront to adventure games when they came out because they asked us to trade out our imagination and all that great writing. I'm supposed to trade that up for these horrible VGA resolutions, barely-animated dudes walking around to the four edges of the screen and trying to click on the right pixel? Of course now, even those games evoke some kind of nostalgic reaction in me. [Laughs.] Time heals all bitterness. But I always in my heart will think of text adventures as the pinnacle of imaginative gaming.

It sounds like there's a twinge of sadness in your voice.

[Laughs.] Video killed the radio star.