On Early Computers and Adventure Games
One day, when I was a teenager way back in 1981, a computer appeared on our dining room table. There was no warning and no explanation. I had never seen a home computer before.
When I looked closely, I saw that the green text on the monitor told me that I was in a meadow with a sleeping dragon and a sign. Obvious exits were south, east, and west. I asked my father what this was. He claimed he didn't know. I knew something was up, but I couldn't resist sliding into the chair. "Go west," I typed.
Thus began my relationship with computers and with adventure games. In an instant, I was hooked. I started by playing adventure games, then began word processing using the LazyWriter software, and soon I was staying up late at night with my father, configuring the operating system by entering a series of cryptic codes. Back in those days, you had to load the operating system into memory and configure it each time you started the computer. We didn't have a disk drive to start with; we loaded programs using a cassette tape player connected to the computer.
I know, I know, you expect me to add that I had to walk ten miles to school in the snow without boots, but seriously, home computers were radically different back then. Most computers like ours had 64k of memory (I bet most your Word documents are bigger than that!) but we had a computer that went to 96k. Woo-hoo! Now that was power.
After a while, I learned the BASIC programming language. I started editing computer games copied from books to make them do what I wanted. I kept writing because I found I wrote a lot faster and more easily with a keyboard and a backspace key. I continued my love affair with adventure games, too, as they progressed from two-word command parsers to complex sentence parsers to 2D graphics and finally to the lush 3D graphic modeling of present day point-and-click adventure games.
It's strange to realize that twenty-five years later, I am still tinkering with my computer, endlessly typing my thoughts, ideas, and checklists, learning programming languages, and now, connecting with a global environment online. Who knew where "go west" was going to take me?
As an adult, my life tends to be too full to take time out for computer games on a regular basis, so every few years I go on an adventure binge, playing all the interesting adventures that have been released in the intervening years. It brings back that familiar sense of discovery, frustration, and triumph. Computer gaming had changed a lot in over two decades. Plenty of die-hards say it was better in the "olden days" when we had to imagine the scenes ourselves. Maybe, but I like seeing what's next, the stories that others thought up and are letting me enter into and the visuals they create. It's all good.
In some sense, I'm probably always going to be that geeky sixteen-year old girl, hunched over her computer, keys clattering away. I was born to this secret society and short of an electromagnetic pulse bomb, I don't think I'm going anywhere.
Okay, enough of the nostalgia. I've got to get back to Still Life. Now that's one cool adventure game!
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