Joseph Wheattree

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JOSEPH: Seems ... down here, we're all strangers. Permanently strange.

Joseph is the owner of Equus Oils and a friend of Lula and Donald from their college days. Joseph has gray hair, is blind, and wears dark glasses. Joseph created the XANADU software with Lula and Donald, and also adapted two of Lem Doolittle's plays for performance as The Entertainment.

Life and work

Joseph created the game "If I Had My Way, I’d Tear the Building Down" in 1985, shown in the (text) museum near the Márquez Farmhouse. In the Rust Archives two sets of samples are under Joseph's name: "Mexico City, VAM Station Wagon, 1974" and "Elizabethtown, Kinetic Sculpture, 1968."

Family

Joseph has a niece who works at the hospital.

Name

Joseph is named after the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum ("Weizenbaum" is German for "wheat tree"), who created ELIZA (which was named after Pygmalion's Eliza Doolittle), a computer program that took on the persona of a psychotherapist (similar to the "Psychotherapist" game found on Joseph's computer at Equus Oils); this program had a large influence on the development of text adventure games.