In 1991, a California software company called Oxxi, Inc. released Aegis Visionary - a boxed authoring system for building your own illustrated adventure games for the Amiga, at home. It was programmed by Kevin Kelm.

John Olsen was born in the 1940s. He worked as a middle-school teacher but he loved to write and develop games in his spare time. In or around 1988, he wrote a small 'escape the island' text adventure for the Commodore 64 - I Was a Cannibal for the FBI. Later, he adapted it into a graphics-and-text adventure for the Amiga, with Aegis Visionary. That version was distributed as the companion and demonstration game for The Visionary Programmer's Handbook, a 384-page guide John wrote to teach would-be creators how to use the software.

A few years after that, a small child sat down with her dad in a bedroom in southern England and pulled a random copied floppy out of a disk case. The handwritten title was irresistibly strange and funny.

They never found a way off the island.

It's me, I'm that child! I never forgot about that game and the fact we didn't beat it. Thirty years later, I bought an original boxed copy of Visionary and a copy of the handbook from eBay to finally find the solution. The entire source code for I Was a Cannibal for the FBI was printed in the back of the handbook. I used it to answer a call from my childhood self.

Then, it all grew into a bit of a strange obsession. I'm Still a Cannibal for the FBI exists because I love ruminating on my niche obsessions and I thought it would be a cool idea to make a nostalgic game in a forgotten language. It's an artwork about reaching through time to close an open loop. It's also my antidote to a fast-moving world I worry, sometimes, is leaving me behind.

My unofficial sequel was created with Visionary, just like John did before me. I took it from an obscure DMS that travelled through the German BBS world and then sat archived on an FTP server for years, waiting for me.

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