Kentucky Route Zero and Project Xanadu

In Act III of the magical Bob Dylan song turned game Kentucky Route Zero, the player enters a cavern populated by a professor and his research team. What exactly they are researching is unclear, but they've been working on it for a long time. The centerpiece of the scene is Xanadu, a computer whose circuits have become coated with the mold that grows in the cave, and which may be poisoning the minds of the team (or represents it? I admit I'm not great at literary analysis). Originally designed as a revolutionary computer system, it has since fallen into decay. However, upon repairing it, the player finds the mold has given the computer abilities beyond the imagination of its original designers - the mold has given it some seed of chaos, and it has learned to perform a simulation of the events leading up to its own creation.

An amusing scene, undercut by my lackluster explanation. The name Xanadu is a reference to a lot of things. The most compelling of these is to the first hypertext project: Project Xanadu. In the 1960s, long before even the concept of a word processor existed, Ted Nelson (who coined the term hypertext) had a vision echoed by the research team hidden away in the cave of Kentucky Route Zero. A vision vast in scope and often described in flowery language about freedom, individuality, and the future and potential of computing, Nelson claims that modern Hypertext is nothing but a simulacrum of paper, and a corruption of his original vision. The project never came to fruition, though the organization still exists and a 'working deliverable' was released in 2014. The key idea, whose essence continues on in the modern web, was that of a user journeying through a universe of text made up of references to other elements of said universe. So in the spirit of that vision, here are some links to stuff that I find interesting.