Conserving Hypertext Art

• John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse
• Translated from HyperCard 2.0 for the Web with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
• 2023

Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse is a hypermedia novel and game built on the HyperCard 2.0 platform and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. Unlike other hypertext literature the company released, Funhouse was distributed in a box containing five 3.5-inch floppy disks, two musical cassette tapes, page proofs of a short story written by Arthur Newkirk entitled "Tree," and a letter from an editor of Vortex magazine to Buddy Newkirk about the page proofs. At the heart of the story is a mystery: You, the reader, are left to solve the mystery of who Uncle Buddy is and what happened to him. The version featured in this exhibition pulls the boxes' artifacts together into an experience for the Web.