Welcome to The Hypertext Hotel!

Now mostly out of reconstruction.

Guests who are unsure if they wish to enter are kindly invited to read the brochure below.

Introduction

“This is not so much a friendly hotel as it is one without proper management, which is to say that within its rooms and corridors, virtually anything can happen...”

The Hypertext Hotel was dreamed up in 1991 by Robert Coover, a professor at Brown with a talent for words and worlds. The Hotel was imagined as a metaphor, a home base of sorts for introducing writers and readers to the world of Interactive Fiction. The medium was still in its infancy, but his idea was far more ambitious than a simple tutorial. The Hypertext Hotel was imagined to be, and gradually became, a collaborative writing experience, with many talented and wonderful people writing in, over, and through each other's stories. It was a space for creatives to thrive, and terribly ambitious on top of that.

And then, in 2003, through no particular fault of anyone (but also no particular effort to preserve it), the Hotel was lost. It had vanished from the internet, it seemed. Even with the great utility of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, only a spare handful of pages could be found. Contact with Brown University, the Hotel's birthplace, confirmed that the files had been lost; they'd been corrupted beyond retrieval, right there on their hard drives. For a time, all seemed truly hopeless.

But now, recovered from the only remaining copies of the files, The Hypertext Hotel returns! The last remnants, which resided on Robert Coover's old personal laptop, required a great deal of skill, hacking, finagling, love, and time to retrieve and restore. Thanks to the concerted efforts of students at Southern Oregon University over multiple years, this fabulous collection of beautiful stories is back and brighter than ever!

Room Service

“So, depending on your agenda, be it ideological, political, poetical, personal, or biological, it seems to me hypertext can greatly enable you toward realizing some things you might not have been able to otherwise, and that's why it's important.”

The Hotel is vast, but it is focused. Some rooms have silly jokes, others have deep, moving stories. Still more are shocking, gory, violent, cringeworthy, and sincere. All of it is obviously oriented toward the goal of creating Art, whatever it is we all mean by that. And, more often than not, it succeeds. This experience might not promise perfection, but it does promise a veritable treasure trove of stories. Interesting stories, always.

The Hotel is vast, though. Near-unimaginably so, from a first glance, though it becomes more manageable with time and exposure. 467 passages of text totalling over 38,000 words, with no real built-in means of navigating them. It's not exactly approachable, and you'll have to bring a handmade map with you to keep from getting lost, but you're guaranteed to learn a thing or two.

The Management

“The Board of Directors is well aware that hotel management is not a precise science. Personalities are involved. Moods, vices and virtues, behavioral eccentricities, character conflicts, the world beyond the hotel, unavoidable feelings of rivalry and resentment.”

The current iteration of the Hotel, as seen here, has been worked on by many dozens of people. The entire “Board of Directors” (of whom the entire list may be located within the Hotel itself) is chock full of folks who worked on the rooms and recreational facilities and later went on to long and fruitful careers, leading companies and winning awards. The new generation of SOU students are just getting their starts, but have bright futures ahead of them all over the various creative industries and beyond.

Housephone

Full credits, full source code, and more can be found here.

“Real estate politics at Brown University, Inc. can sometimes drive a man with two legs to eat his own macoroni from his hat.”