Hey guess what? I’m writing the Geek in Review for the Suicide Girls Newswire again. Instead of a weekly column, it’ll be monthly, and a new column will go up on the second Wednesday of every month.
Today’s column is called “… when the MCP was just a chess program.”
The earliest video games didn’t just encourage us to use our imaginations when we played them, they forced us to. Yar’s Revenge, the best-selling original title on the Atari 2600, has simple yet entertaining gameplay, but it was supported by an extraordinarily rich backstory, turning it into one chapter in an epic struggle for cosmic justice. When I was 9, I wasn’t just chipping away at the shield while I readied my Zorlon cannon; I was helping the Yar extract revenge on the Qotile for the destruction of their planet, Razak IV, as illustrated in the comic that came with the game.
When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot. I flipped the power on, picked up the joystick, and booted up my imagination as I sat in the command chair of my very own space ship. For the next hour, I was a member of the Atarian Starship Fleet. I was all that stood between the Zylon Empire and the destruction of humanity. Through my cockpit’s viewscreen (developed at great expense by the RCA corporation back on Earth) I blasted Zylon starships and Zylon basestars, and I would have defeated them all, if my meddling mother hadn’t made me stop and eat dinner!
When I was writing the GiR before, the powers that be at SG always made sure the newswire was SFW. As far as I know, they’re still doing that, but your corporate firewall probably doesn’t know or care, so consider yourself warned about reading at work.
Discover more from WIL WHEATON dot NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Wow, I thought I was the only person that ever had a TI99/4a! First program I ever “wrote” was a game copied out of a magazine which I then saved to a cassette tape. Good times, good times. My two favorite games where Hunt the Wumpus and Parsec. I later got a hand me down Apple IIe and thus started my Infocom addiction. Their games were the first I ever spent my own money on. I loved their packaging and all the little things the put in there to get you into the world.
Sometime around the mid-nighties I bought this CD set with a bunch of old games just because they had the full line of Infocom games on them. I could replay all my old favorites on my brand new PowerMac 6100. Eight or so years after that I came across Zoom and used those CDs to extract all of files so I could play them on Mac OS X. Most of them work very well including the later “graphical” games they made like Zork Zero. The only ones that don’t look right are the ones that used Infocom’s special font for drawing maps and other displays (Journey and Beyond Zork I’m looking at you!) I’ve searched high and low for that font and even tried my had at creating a few times with decidedly poor results.
Thank you for this lovely trip down memory lane. I have to go now, I think I hear Floyd calling me.
Bummer.
Now that you’re back at SG, you’ve lost me as a reader.
I will not support them in any way due to their litigous and fraudulent business practices.
Bye.
You realize that reading the unconnected personal blog of a part-time contributor does not, in fact, support them in any way, right?
You realize that reading the unconnected personal blog of a part-time contributor does not, in fact, support them in any way, right?
You know I’m all for taking a principled stand. But seriously, you’d be lucky to buy a pair of shoes without supporting “litigous and fradulent business practices”.
I still have my “Commander, Federation of Laser Blasters” patch for defending the Earth from the alien threat. I’d forgotten how much of the fun was the narrative being built up in my head.
Hey Christopher, from the Apneatic.com website:
“We want to make it clear that we 100% have no hostilities towards SuicideGirls in anyway anymore, we all came to a really fair agreement over this dispute, and there were no bad people here, just mistakes and misunderstandings. If you’ve boycotted SG on our behalf, you helped us come to this agreement, so thank you but the battle is over, and we’re all friends again.”
Deep breaths, man. The war is over.
I remember playing Star Raiders as a child myself, and I am young enough to have idolized you on Star Trek (you were totally my first TV crush — you were a hot older geek boy and I was in love). My little brother was always my co-pilot, and we’d have turns shooting down the enemy from our luxurious star fighter. Sure, it was comprised of a coffee table painted 70’s puke green, a couple of chairs, and a sheet, but it was enough to immerse us in the starfield and the battles. It’s been a long time since I got that kind of pleasure from a game. Thank you for the memory.
You’re right about the corporate firewall not caring about whether the content is actually SFW or not. The word “Suicide” in the name causes a red flag, so no reading at work.
>>When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot. I flipped the power on, picked up the joystick, and booted up my imagination as I sat in the command chair of my very own space ship.<< OMG! I thought I was the only one who did this. I have to say Wil, it's not the first time you've written something where I've said that. (Atari 800 owner in early 82)
Yeah!!!
TI99/4a rules!!!
@ Michael Krzyzek, Parsec was also my favorite game! I remember one Christmas my dad said we could order a joystick or another game and I chose another game (Matterhorn, maybe?). Anyway, one of his buddies at work found out how far I was into Parsec without a joystick and came over to watch me play on the keyboard one day — he challenged me to a game, him using his joystick and I on the keyboard with the condition that if I got further, he would give me his joystick. I won, and that was positively, the coolest I had ever felt in my life up to that point. (Of course I’m much cooler now, ahem)
Wil — I wanted to pop back over here to comment and say that this was a very satisfying read. Nicely done! If going monthly means that you now have time to turn out this kind of quality going forward, we have MUCH to look forward to. Thanks!
man I loved Yar’s Revenge.
Dude! There was a sit-down version of Sinistar??? Now I feel cheated. Oh well, at least I had the sit-down versions of Star Wars (vector graphics FTW!) and the Star Trek game, the one whose gameplay was loosely based on the look/feel of the first movie…
Did you ever talk back to the machine while playing Star Wars? (I assume you did play Star Wars.)
[i]Look at the size of that thing![/i]
“Cut the chatter, Red Two.”
[i]Use the Force, Luke![/i]
“Get off my back, old man – you’re dead!”
[i]Assume attack formation. I’m on the leader.[/i]
“That’s right, line up real nice so I can kill you…”
Star Raiders, and Star Raiders II, were two of the only computer games I ever really enjoyed (no judgement, somehow they never “click” with me – perhaps because all I can think about is how they’re programmed).
I think they’d make a great retro Nintendo DS cartridge, but no one at Atari/Infogrames or whoever owns it now seems interested in a reissue.
If you know anyone in the game development biz, maybe they can talk some sense into them.
Amazing how a couple of years and maybe standing a few feet to the left affect what you grew up on.
The first video games I remember playing obsessively were on the C64, just sitting in front of that monitor playing MULE and Wasteland over and over.
HokieSeas… ah Wasteland. One of my all-time faves. I liked rushing into the Atchison (?) tent and killing the pistol-packing baby (along with the rest of the family). That was one of the hardest fights of the game, in my opinion. And the whole “church of the mushroom cloud” thing, genius! Thermodynamism FTW!
Sadly, I have never played MULE.
HUGE SUCCESS indeed, Wil. Your “final” Geek In Review is how I first heard about WWdN, actually. Two paperbacks and an audiobook later, I still check in nearly every day.
Glad to have you back at SG, though. The newswire just hasn’t been the same without you.
~NickGuy
We had the Magnavox Odyssey which was 1 step above just pong. It had printed mylar overlays that you had to tape over your TV screen. That was it. I was all arcade during the 80s, and I took on a paper route to pay for my $5/day habit.
The next console I bought was a SNES.
I actually kept my old consoles and games (apart from the Odyssey). I still have the Turbographix, the SNES, the Playstation, the N64, the PS2, the GameCube and a Wii… with a bunch of games. Better still, I happened across a vintage Pong console that I keep in the garage (carefully wrapped up). I also have a GBC, a GBA and a DS.
I find that I still really like the simplicity of some of the really old games. However, I’m 41 and getting twitchy about kids on my lawn.
Wil! Sorry, not related to the post, but did you hear that they’ve (probably) found a new home for the Star Trek: The Experience ride?!? It’s supposed to be at some place in downtown Vegas called the Neonopolis. It’s not definate yet but highly likely from what I’ve read. I’m so excited! I went to Vegas during part of my Honeymoon, and it was just the coolest feeling ever to be on the bridge. I had the biggest smile. I hope it comes back so bad…
I miss text games, or at least a game text parser. Hitchiker’s still stands up and is, in many ways, better than the book as a starting point. It took a long time to work out the babelfish, but I ended up getting the invisiclues at one point on the heart of gold. Then there was the pornographic version of Star Trek. Ah, memories.
I think I still have the Jujanta 2000 sunglasses and the Don’t Panic button somewhere.
Nice to see you posting at SGs again.
Have you seen this. It is a bit shocking 🙂
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/11/images/20081112_d-0077-5-515h.html
Hey, Christopher Ambler, the Baptists called. They want their totally ineffectual boycott back.
@OCCanuck99: That photo was a shocker.
@Hugo Fuchs: The Hitchhiker’s game was weird and frustrating, but hilarious. I still remember how to get the Babel Fish in my ear. Play it online… Experience again the adventure, the excitement, the really wild things!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml
I loved the Zork games too. I added an empty can of Grue repellant as a strange non-functioning artifact in D&D once.
Time for a bit of a confession…
In the mid 80’s I wrote a text adventure for the C64 called ‘Disaster on the Enterprise’. After some generic space anomaly disabled the Enterprise the player had to team up with another crew member to get to engineering and fix the warp core before it blew up.
The crew member you had to team up with?
One young Wesley Crusher.
I was about ten when I wrote it and it was a complete Mary Sue story where the player was Wesley’s classmate.
Unfortunately, no copy of ‘Disaster on the Enterprise’ currently exists as far as I know (pre-internet and shared on cassette with about 15 like-minded friends)…but considering the dialogue *I* gave Wesley was almost as bad as the TV shows…maybe that’s a good thing.
Hey Wil, sorry about the total randomness of this comment. I noticed a photo of your dog on flickr and s/he looks EXACTLY like my dog. I got my dog from a shelter and have no clue what kind of dog she is. (I would have sent you and email, but my eyes glazed over when I tried to figure out the encryption thing. Sorry!)
SG is superdoubleplusblocked at work, so I shall check out your GiR later this evening. 🙂
Yay for the return of GiR!
Also, Wil, did @Hodgman call you Mark Wheaton in his Crystal Skull thank you Tweet? Is this some kind of joke whose context I totally missed? Or was there coincidentally another Wheaton there who gave him a crystal skull?
Love following your Twitter stream, btw. 🙂
Wil – it’s great to have you back on multiple internet tubey-things again. I appreciate you sharing your viewpoint on so many different topics.
Something that I (and I’m assuming many others) would find interesting is how you became involved with so many different blog projects; it seems a bit daunting to write for five or six different sites with various requirements, deadlines, etc.
Totally random I know, but what made you pick the picture top right? is it comic com?
I’ve misssed GiR. Yay.
I know you check for these things, so I thought I’d share. There was an article on the geek about Settlers strategy.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/355824
Wil: have you seen this comic yet?
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp11122008.shtml
Wil, Like you I too grew up in the ‘70’s &’80’s. I was there from the beginning. Playing “:Space Invaders” and “Asteroids” at my local record shop, Round Records dominated most of my free time. Of course my brother and I had an Atari we didn’t have much money and kind of missed out on all of the home game boxes after that but we would still hang out at the arcade and just watch. I loved the Tron game because it was like a phone booth (remember those) in which the player stood inside, surrounded by the game. I loved that. And when Dragon’s Layer came out? MAN! This game was so popular the arcade owner had to put a TV monitor on top of the game because the crowd of people was SO big the folks in back could see. After that I kind of fell out of the game thing. But as a young adult with his first home PC nothing, and I mean NOTHING will ever come close the feeling I got playing Doom and Heretic for the first time. Playing these games at 2 am with the lights off would just give me the creeps but it was just great. Using the B.F.G. (which stands for Big Fucking Gun by the way) or the Gauntlet of the Necromancer was a thrill. I think I shit myself the first time I saw my first Iron Litch. And the great adventure games like Sam and Max, Full Throttle and Myst. These where games my whole family would pull up chairs around just to watch. I have played many great games , Halo, Gears of War and the like, but no mater how great the graphic’s and game play get nothing will ever compare.
Wil, while I know this is Off-Topic I saw something I thought you’d enjoy, if they only had holes for Hooks you might even use them as a Geek Christmas Tree Ornament(if the weren’t so expensive that is).
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15839503
When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot.
I totally wish I had thought of that when I was 10…I wonder how long I can do that today before the wife yells at me.