Earlier this week, some of my uber-geek friends at work were talking about the videogame-du-jour, Age of Conan. I must admit, that although I’m very impressed with the whole gaming experience that modern PCs present, I’m not willing to put forth the financial and technical commitment required to power these ever resource hungry games. In fact, some of my favorite computer/video games are those of days gone by. I play my Super Nintendo games a lot more often than I do those on my Nintendo 64. In fact, it brought a little tear to my eye when PAC-MAN, Ms. PAC-MAN, and other “classic” video games were brought to the consumer-friendly formats that are self-contained within the controller, run by batteries, and plug into any television. I guess this makes be a video game Luddite of sorts...
My 1982 era Atari 2600 aside (It didn’t really provide the same gaming experience as the arcades), my first foray into video gaming on computers was several games I had on my Commodore 64. Waaayyy back in 1987, it had graphics and sound that enabled the creative game programmer to provide a version for the C64 that looked, sounded, and played just like the arcade versions.
But I wasn’t really “hooked” on a PC game (Meaning that I spent hour after hour trying to “complete” the game) until I was introduced to Commander Keen my sophomore year in college. Of course, as luck would have it, my own computer needed an upgrade before I could play it in my room, so I spent most of my waking hours in the computer lab in front of the one computer up to the task… It also helped that a great deal of that time I was being paid for my time spent “researching sound and graphics capabilities of modern computers”. Guess that was one of the unspoken benefits of being a lab assistant and often working the late shifts when no one was around needing me to “help” them write their homework programs.
At that time, the open source software movement was not yet in full swing, and if you wanted cool games, you paid for them dearly. And on the budget of a college student, I just couldn’t afford them. However, the nice folks at Softdisk decided to release their new game as “Shareware”, a concept by which sharing the software is encouraged, meaning that there was no tricky copy protection or key codes required to use the software. The only thing asked of the end user was to contribute some small amount to the developers, on a goodwill basis. Of course, LOTS of folks, including myself, shared the software without ever contributing monetarily.
But back to Commander Keen… My favorite game in high school was Super Mario Brothers. I used to take a dollar to school, pay 75 cents for lunch, and ride to the local bowling alley after school to play one game of SMB with the leftover quarter. Obviously out of necessity, I had to get good at the game if my money was to be well spent… When I first saw Commander Keen, I thought “Hmmm… Looks a lot like Super Mario Brothers”. I played my first game and was instantly hooked. It’s a game in a class called “side scrollers”, where you basically have a 2D world that you travel through, using four directional keys and two buttons, the standard for most side scroller games. The cartoonish graphics and sound were a world apart from previous games for IBM compatible PCs, using a newly developed graphics technology called EGA… With stunning 16 color graphics!!! The original developers released several sequels, and there were other folks who developed other similarly themed side scroller games (Duke Nukem), but Commander Keen was the one for me… Of course, at that time, there wasn’t any world wide web, so the only way to get them was the old fashioned sneaker net or forums on local dial in bulletin boards (you had to be RICH to get 9600bps – most common was 2400bps).. Ultimately, technology advanced and newer style games (first person shooter, etc) were developed to harness the more powerful machines’ capabilities, but those never really caught on for me… Give me a side scroller and a joystick with a red ball on top, and I’ll show you fun!!!
And a side note – shareware had a sidekick called “freeware”, which was entirely free, and didn’t even suggest a monetary donation. Individually developed and distributed, freeware products became the way by which companies could get their name known… But one side effect was that once folks were used to shareware and freeware being actually quality software, it opened the door for the open source software movement to gain popularity and viability… But that’s a discussion for another time and pla
