If you played the early Sierra adventure games back in the 1980s, chances are you that you spent a lot of time wandering back and forth between its simple, bitmap screens, trying to gather and deploy odd bits of treasure. That’s why the images produced by the Twitter bot @quest_glitches may feel a little bit like childhood dreams for fans of games like Kings Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry: the familiar forests, beaches and old houses you used to wander, drifting back to the surface of your mind out of context, strangely deconstructed down to jagged wireframes or flooded with color. Or maybe just the face of a woman you once knew, but whose name you can’t remember, half-dissolved by time.
@Quest_glitches was created by Adam Mathes, who also made a bot called @Quest_ebooks that remixes the narration of the old adventure games into strange new tweets. In an interview with Kill Screen where he explains the process he used to create his glitch screens, Mathes explains that “there’s some sense that with these generative programs, simple and primitive as they are, there’s this little bit of illusion of infinity and immortality to these things we loved.” For players of a certain age and a certain time, it’s a strange and lovely way to remember.
