Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse

Funhouse is framed as a collection of items that belonged to a person named Art "Uncle Buddy" Newkirk, which have been turned over to the reader by a team of lawyers following their untimely demise.

Delving deeper, the player can access an inverted version of the Funhouse, whose works are written by an alternative identity of Newkirk's named Emily Kean.

[9] The seed for Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse was first planted when McDaid was prompted by a friend to create a piece of fiction that could not be written by a 20th century author, and was further spurred on by the release of Michael Joyce's afternoon.

[10] Funhouse began development in 1986, inspired by an experience in which the author's "dying Aunt Rita sent him a See's candy box filled with odds and ends that constituted a portion of her "estate" that she wished to give McDaid".

[8] Students in the Creative Media & Digital Culture at the Washington State University at Vancouver and the Electronic Literature Lab developed an archival version using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

[13] In the 1993 New York Times Book Review, Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer, Robert Coover, noted the "sheer pleasure of play in John McDaid's many-roomed funhouse.