This thought decended on me and I thought I’d rant on it for a little bit this morning.
Does anyone else remember the old Sierra On-line games? King’s Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, and Liesure Suit Larry? I was reminded of Space Quest this morning because I thought I saw the Health food store selling dehydrated water and it reminded me of the whole Orat thing. Stupid alien.
Last article I wrote about the Open Gaming movement. One specific use of open gaming has been the creation of what are called ‘RetroClones’. Though I have seen a variety of philosophies discussed over what the term actually means, from my outside view it seems to just mean that they are using the Open Gaming License to replicate the rules of older versions of Dungeons & Dragons in a newer, slightly shinier package.
Today we’re staying with my Parents for Caleb’s birthday. He is three today. I noticed while connected to my parent’s Network that they have a NAS drive setup. One of the first directories on the NAS drive is ‘Caleb is Born’. This picture here is one of my favorites from that directory because he looks like he’s plotting.
I just tried to convince Caleb to laugh menacingly but he informed me that I’m Dr. Doom and HE is ‘Hulk Smash’. So he’s willing to growl for me, but no maniacal laughter. Maybe later.Read More
For whatever reason, when I first started getting into Dungeons and Dragons it was the AD&D Books that caught my eye. I remember using my allowance to pick up all of the old yellow spined 1st Edition AD&D books. My first experience with the original Red Box (which came out at the same time as 1st Ed AD&D according to Wikipedia) was when my next door neighbor inherited it. I remember that it was used because whoever had had it before had created a whole bunch of index cards for each of the rooms of their dungeons all in pencil.
Bill Olander.. William R. Olander.. passed away March 18th, 1989. He died of complications resulting from AIDS. He was by all accounts an amazing man. I’ve linked to NY Time’s obit below.
I’ve been vaguely aware of this particular Bill Olander who is not myself for several years. Its one of those things you find out when you google yourself to see what people are saying about you on the internet. Today someone came looking for this man on my site for the first time that I’m aware. I thought it was worth while to talk about someone who I would be honored to be mistaken for.
Back in 5th grade, I got it into my head that I wanted to buy myself a Nintendo. My parents made me a deal where they would match the money I made mowing lawns if rather than an NES, I bought a computer. The Christmas after my big purchase I received King’s Quest III as my first computer game. I later went back to the first two King’s Quest games but I didn’t go much further back than that.
That’s not to say I was completely unaware of prior games. I have a vague memory of playing Zork (Not to be confused with Jean Batiste Emmanuel Zorg) on a friend’s Commodor 64 computer but it wasn’t one of those moments that was seared into my memory banks. Even worse was the ‘Science Fair’ where I stayed up late several nights trying to build one of these things only to half-ass the presentation with a ‘Find the Bugs’ sign. Not my most shining moment and best forgotten. Even so, I found myself strangely elated when I discovered Inform 7 and Interactive Fiction in general.
For those of you who don’t remember or just didn’t exist at the time… there was a time when computers didn’t have super fancy graphics and weren’t connected to each other. The games created for these computers were text based where in you walked your character through the world by typing ‘Go North’ and ‘Open Door’. They could be frustrating when trying to find just the right phrasing to do what you wanted to do. Though I haven’t played with it yet, Inform seems designed to mitigate this by adding in some fuzzy logic to the parsing.
By the late 80s, Text Adventure Games had gone their way only to move their way onto the internet in the form of MUDs where you would play these games with other players. As with so many things that have become outdated (remind me to make a post about the retro-gaming movement) the business of Text Adventure Games became the hobby of Interactive Fiction. In the hands of ‘the people’ creativity flourished leading the way for experimental works that were as much art as they were ‘games’. Interactive Fiction will never be big business again but it is amazing to see the the evolution of the medium.
Yet another little piece of awesome that I was previously unaware of.
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This post is actually going to be very self indulgent. Recently the Atomic think tank upgraded and given that I’d been on there since 2003 I wanted to go through and document some of the ideas that have come out of my head and seen decent discussion. There is at least one item on this list where no one cared even a little. It is here because I want to delve into that item for some specific inspiration. If you’re just passing through, no need to worry about a list of links but if you’re curious to see what I get up to from time to time, well then here you go.
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