When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, while other kids were interested in football and cowboys and indians, I was interested in mechanics, engineering, electronics and archaeology. This probably sounds nerdy nowadays, but in the fifties practical subjects were important career paths - it was the kids who wasted their time on sports who were regarded as losers.
At the start of the seventies the engineering firm I was apprenticed to went bust, and I became a firefighter. The Fire Brigade didn’t have its own mainframe computer, but the County Council did, and the Brigade had terminals that linked to it. If you were friendly with the computer technicians (and I made sure I was), they could give you an access code that allowed you to play a game they had secretly installed on the Council’s computer.
So it was that in 1978, my friends and I would sneak into the offices on night shifts, and play “Colossal Cave Adventure” - an early text adventure. We were gaming pioneers.
The admin offices were part of the fire station - just supposedly locked up and unmanned at night. The terminals were in the offices, and resourceful guys will find duplicate keys…
Sounds like you were pioneering point and click adventures back then too.
Was it the key in the soap with the silly putty mold? Or the rubber glove on the pulley out the awning by the back window solution to get into that locked room?
Nice! I didn’t discover Infocom until the later 1980s, about the time text adventures were becoming gauche. Somebody installed Beyond Zork on our college dormitory system, and I fell in love somewhere around the Zeno’s Paradox puzzle. Still have a box set of all the games; Trinity was my favorite, followed closely by Suspended.
And that’s what I’m loving about this unfolding ARG. That same kind of out-of-the-box puzzle solving mentality required, with goals defined only as you solve the puzzles…
One of the innovations in gaming that came later was the ability to save your progress. The version I played, you had to start from the beginning, every time. So I remember the start really well. “You are in the well-house for a small spring…”. I don’t think I ever finished it.
No point and click, though. No mouse - they hadn’t been invented yet. Typed text only. And no graphics. Those terminals only had one font. And the text was green.
My first ADP correspondence course in the military sent punch cards and a plastic punch tool. Correctly punch cards, then return for grading. Man, ancient history now.
There’s Win95 virtual machines, so I guess that’s what he’s using? I can’t imagine getting that code to run without another layer of abstraction in between. I don’t think even building an API bridge would still be possible at that point, the architecture is too different.
