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Very cool. Rather than be a jerk and talk about why there are so few references to the text and early graphics games from the 60s and 70s, maybe I'll have to p
by OhMeadhbh 2y ago
Very cool.
Rather than be a jerk and talk about why there are so few references to the text and early graphics games from the 60s and 70s, maybe I'll have to pitch the VGHF people on a blog post and book and software collection focused on the 60s-70s era of computer gaming.
I was introduced to computers (and computer gaming) in the mid-70s, just immediately before the "trinity" microcomputers hit the market in '77. Our school district in North Texas had access to an HP mainframe (HP-2000?) to teach advanced kids BASIC. Part of my early education involved tearing apart the text-oriented BASIC versions of Hammurabi, Hunt the Wumpus and Star Trek. They would hardly be called "games" today. My dad had business contacts at UIUC and they were infamous for giving ANYONE a PLATO account, so I learned about the friendly orange glow and social computing in "the data center in the corn field." Anyone who played rogue or PLATO/EMPIRE could see where the industry was going by 1980.
And the sad bit is we've lost most of the people who developed these games in the 60s and 70s. I think I'll pitch the idea of a small collection of David Ahl books, DECUS games tapes and an interview or two with a few of the remaining coders.
Give me a +1 if you're hip to the old text based games, often coded in BASIC and played on microcomputers.
- eleveriven 2y agoPLATO, Rogue, Hammurabi, Star Trek, Wumpus - these games weren’t just early experiments, they set the groundwork for so much of what came after
- HideousKojima 2y agoMy dad recalls playing Star Trek at Berkeley in the 70's, and they used a teletype because whatever computer lab he played it in didn't have any terminals with monitors yet.
- eleveriven 2y agoEarly gaming had such a great mix of limitations and creativity. In a way I miss it
- crtasm 2y agoIf they're somehow not already in touch I'm sure the authors of https://if50.textories.com/ https://if50.textories.com/ and https://www.filfre.net/ https://www.filfre.net/ would give some great input.
- ForOldHack 2y agoAhem +1. I am hip to two generations of text based games, and HP 2000B. We programmed roulette on B.U.S.D, Berkeley Unified School District. Got the David Ahl books, but did not have access to the DECUS games tapes. ( Now I find that David Ahl was working at DEC, got canned, and then started Creative Computing ) Add Life, and Lunar Lander. Later in college, we had IBM PCs, Monochrome, so ... we found both Rogue, and went over to Berkeley, and met Michael, and Glenn. We also had Empire, converted from Fortran, to the PC. and... Nethack. We wanted to get Nethack running on Xenix... blew up the whole machine twice... And of corse HHGTTG. Hitch Hikers guide to the galaxy. Over at Egghead, the sales guy had solved most of it, and told us about the really hardest parts. Now, the entire Infocomm library runs in a web browser. Soon, my roommate got an Amiga, and a modem.