river

yep! the first one was held in his living room. the last one he attended was his "dragon speech".

bit of an essay question, but basically he left the games industry to focus on his particular definition of "interactive storytelling", believing that it was totally unique and totally unlike anything anyone in the games or IF spaces were doing, and beavered away at it for the rest of the 90s and 00s with very little real progress - instead of keeping up with the field, collaborating with people who were doing interesting things, and generally participating in all the thinking happening in interactive design spaces at the time. his definitions for success and worthiness were oddly rigid, he wasn't willing to give anyone else's approaches credit, and his problem solving approaches were incredibly narrow - he just kinda kept banging his head on the same unworkable ideas for decades, and he became totally irrelevant. it's a sad fate for a designer who at least at one point appeared to have strong ideas, strong execution skills, and worked comfortably across lots of different genres and styles.