Pick up the Phone Booth and Die

Pick up the Phone Booth and Die is a video game in the adventure genre originally released in 1996. It is currently playable on DOS.

This first interactive fiction game, an example of minimalist gameplay, joins the increasingly popular subgenre of 'one-room games' with an elegant additional constraint: the room ('in the middle of a pretty square in the middle of a nondescript New England town') contains a single object, the titular phone booth (shiny, metallic and, defying conventional usage, welded). The title, a simple cause-and-effect statement, provokes and challenges the player, offering only a direct path to a fruitless ending; the player is left to determine something, anything, more satisfying to do with the booth in question. '. . . there's not much to see or do here, but you might find something fun and enjoyable to do'.

The game is so light, consisting of this one single one-step puzzle, that it's practically a riddle or logic problem; if there were more, they might be lines from a Zen comedian. As it is, the 'game' (such as it is) is hardly sizable, but it's worth a nibble.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.