Thursday January 17, 2008

What Was Your First Gaming Experience?

Inspired by : slashdot.org

The first real computer game I played was Lode Runner on my Apple //e back in 1985. I was about 12 years old. A guy in a white long-sleeved shirt came over to my home, delivered the computer, gave me one of those multi-colored Apple stickers that said "Apple Computer", set it up, and slotted the floppy disk into the drive.

The first level of Lode Runner came up. He couldn't get the tiny figure to move. The fellow shrugged, tried a bit more, and gave up. He said something about trying to find out how to play the game if he could. I never heard from him again.

I hit every key on the keyboard, starting from the numbers row to the QWERTY row, to ASDF and so on. There was no numeric keypad. I would not hear about numeric keypads until years later. I tried the arrow keys. Nothing. Most of the keys would start the game, upon which the bad guys would start coming after the Lode Runner but he froze there, unable to move. The Lode Runner would die on the spot when a bad guy touched him. Over and over. I gave up, and turned off the power.

The next day, I tried again. One of the keys felt different. It was harder to press and it clicked loudly when I pressed it. Then I happened to press one of the alphabet keys. J. The Lode Runner moved! He ran!

That was a long, long time before I read about the history of the Apple II series of computers, about how the older variants did not even have a Caps Lock key, and they were only able to type UPPERCASE characters, and how the Apple //e (that's how it's written folks) was the very first Apple II variant to be able to produce both lowercase and uppercase letters. It was a huge leap forward at the time. Imagine people typing letters or business documents or whatever it was they did on those computers back then in all-caps on the Apple II or II+. In today's context, it might look like they have all been SHOUTING LOUDLY.

What happened was this : the existing games of the time did not know about lowercase letters. Lode Runner was listening for IJKL and it did not understand ijkl in lowercase. Once I figured that part out, Lode Runner proved to be fun and challenging. I figured out U and O and how you needed to dig holes to run over the bad guys (I found out almost 20 years later that they were called "Bungelings"). I figured out how to restart the game. I fought my way through all 150 levels. I went into the level editor (Ctrl-R, E) and made my own levels and saved them to a blank disk.

Lode Runner had gameplay, and complexity, and replayability that you don't find in many games nowadays. It was a great game.

(2008-01-17 00:04:38 SGT) [Tech] Permalink Comments [1]

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