Games That Defined Me (Part 1)

It’s introduction week all this week in Blaugust. Yesterday I shared a little bit about my bridge hunting passion, today it’s a more relevant list of games.

I’m lucky or cursed to be born on the phase transition between Boomers and Generation X. Not really one or the other. The Beatles had been long broken up by the time I started listening to the radio. Never understood what anyone saw in Elvis (and still don’t). The bands I rocked out to in high school were Queen, Boston, Kansas, Heart and such.

Star Trek (AKA Space War)

I went into high school having failed Algebra I. I sucked at pretty much every subject. I was hoping to, at least, be able to learn to write something worth reading. Maybe really immerse myself in German and try to become a translator. Computers… were Star Trek, or the Forbin Project. I was pretty sure, if you were using a computer and made a mistake, it would definitely explode. They always exploded in the movies.

When a kid in my German class showed up with a roll of paper tape, punched out with computer code, that contained a game, I just had to see it working. He showed me to the computer lab at Concord High, showed me how to thread the tape through the reader, and how to run the game. That game was Star Trek, and each turn typed out slowly and with much wasted paper on the teletype terminal.

I’d found my purpose. I retook Algebra I and took Algebra II the same year. I graduated with great grades, with a certificate in computers. My life was irrevocably changed.

ADVENT AKA Colossal Cave Adventure

I went on to the University of New Hampshire, crushing my dad’s hopes that I would go to his alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute — Woopie Tech. Since I went to the public university, I had to pay for it on my own dime. My dimes ran out after my sophomore year, unfortunately.

I had two student jobs there; one was writing news for the college radio station, WUNH 91.3 — the Freewaves. The other was student consultant for the computer clusters on campus. The cluster controllers were PDP-8s, same as the computer at Concord High. The two mainframes on campus were PDP-10s, big, hulking behemoths named Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was reserved for school administration. Charybdis was the one for students. We couldn’t play games on Charybdis until it was below 85% capacity — what we gamers called “the Charybdis Line”. One of the first utility programs I ever wrote there was a graphical display program that tracked the Charybdis Line and sounded an alert when it went into the green zone.

ADVENT was the first adventure game I ever played. I think it might have been the first adventure game anyone had ever written. It was called ADVENT because six letters was as long as a file name could be on TOPS-10, the O/S for the PDP-10. We knew it was short for Adventure, and we all still just always called it Advent.

ADVENT was written in FORTRAN, and so I learned FORTRAN and wrote my own version, called HOUSE, based heavily on the ADVENT code. It started off in my parents’ house in Concord and went weird places. There was a room where you could write a message that other players could read. It stored the message in a common area used for temporary files, so messages wouldn’t stick around long, but it was cool when someone would happen upon the room and read the message and write their own. MUDs and MUSHes and MOOs were in the future, but we were already exploring the space in the early 80s. The real multiuser game development was happening at the same time in PLATO, but we didn’t have that at UNH.

Walter Bright’s EMPIRE

The first 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) game I ever played was also on the PDP-10, EMPIRE. Note the six letter file name.

I’d never seen a game like this before — a common occurrence, as whole genres of video games were being continually invented all the time back then. You start out with one city that produces one unit — an army. Your mission is to find other cities, make more armies, troop transports, fighter jets, battleships and so on, and conquer the computer opponent. You’d move around, uncovering the map, and then an enemy unit would blip into view for a second. And then the race was on.

These types of games are common these days. Empire itself had a long life on both mainframes and microcomputers. It’s inspired franchises like Civilization, Age of Empires, arguably even Sim City.

There was another game back then also called Empire, but that was on Unix, and I didn’t encounter Unix until years after I’d left UNH. That other Empire was a similar game, played on a hex grid, and could have over a hundred players at a time on a huge map. Moves were typed in and sent to the hosting server, and every ten minutes to an hour, even to a full day, all the moves would be processed simultaneously and the results sent to all the players. This game also still exists; it’s called Wolfpack Empire now. I’ve never actually played it.

Rogue

The last of the PDP-10 games that I feel really defined me was ROGUE. Rogue didn’t actually work too well, the version that was installed. It would crash a lot. I had to get the sources and recompile them to get them to work. I think this was originally written in C? I don’t think it was FORTRAN. I didn’t know C back then. Anyway, I got it working and headed down to save the Amulet of Yendor from the Wizard. I don’t think I ever made it out alive. Pretty sure of it, actually.

Years later, I’d get deep into LARN, ANGBAND, Hack and of course NetHack. These early descendants of Rogue led to the Rogue-like genre which today encompasses games as different as Diablo and Hades. I was finally vindicated when it was ported to the Atari ST and I finally rescued the Amulet of Yendor and ascended.

Next time, I’ll continue with some more modern games.