13 April 2002 - 19:26

I've been spending a lot more time on-line lately than I have since I came to college. Hmm. Time for a trip down memory lane.

I've used computers for as long as I can remember. When I was a tot, my dad would sit me on his lap in front of our Apple //e. We programmed in Logo--our most ambitious project drew a house in different colors with animated twinkling stars above, all while playing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

During my gradeschool years I started playing computer games on the IBM 286 clone that my dad cobbled together while I watched. I spent countless happy hours sitting in front of the computer chair, fingers curled around the joystick or clattering on the keyboard, mom and little brother Zarlawick at my side. First came The Black Cauldron, then Space Quest I and King's Quest II.

Over several years we picked up and conquered the best of the Sierra On-Line/Dynamix line-up: SQ 1 - 5, KQ 1 - 7 (all three versions of 1), Gold Rush, Conquests of Camelot, Conquests of Long Bow, EcoQuest 1 & 2, Willy Beamish, Colonel’s Bequest, Torin’s Passage, Pepper’s Adventures in Time.

Then, of course, the best of the best--Quest for Glory. Right around the age of, oh, 10 or 11 we picked up the VGA version of QfG 1 (I own the original now too). I thought it was perhaps the best adventure game I’d ever played. I really, really loved it. It had the best traits of the KQ & SQ style adventure games that I loved--great storytelling and plot, object-based interaction/puzzles, pretty art combined with well-written text descriptions and stupid puns. It also had the best traits of computer RPGs--well worked character stats, passage of time & day/night cycles, the ability to brutally fight monsters, eat, drink, achieve a goal via multiple pathways, and lots of dialogue with characters in the game. I created a fighter character with some thief traits, named him Gaylen, and ported him to QfG 2 (which we, in the full extent of our devotion, played off the 12 floppy disks, as we were unable to convince it to install). Then we waited breathlessly for QfG 3 to come out. And after that (it ends on a real cliff-hanger), finally, at last, QfG 4, which I believe we purchased the day it was released. This was actually rather unfortunate, as it had more bugs than any other game I’ve ever owned. We had to start over from the beginning twice, having almost completed the game and then reached errors that could not be circumnavigated--hours on the phone with tech support (back when it was free) eventually resulted in a set of patch disks. Then we went through the whole thing again, which resulted in a second set of patch disks, which finally seemed to fix the problem. It is especially unfortunate, because this game is an artistic masterpiece. Captivating art, a storyline that has really matured a lot, great characterization, involving game play, excellent use of time-flow. Possibly my all-time favorite.

Between their very involving, interactive nature and their very strongly archetypal story, and the fact that I happened upon them at a special point in my life, the games became something of a coming-of-age for me. Not exactly a wilderness quest, no. But Zarlawick and I would spend 12 hour stretches of time playing them, I incorporated them into drawings and poetry, I kept a journal in my character’s voice. The games invaded my sleeping dreams. I could easily recite a variety of jokes, poems, and prophesies from them. I used them as metaphores for ideas about love, honor, duty, friendship, passion, exploration, freedom, discovery, longing, life well lived. I realized that I was indebted to the games creators, husband and wife team Lori & Corey Cole. I wrote them several long letters and I would swear that I sent one of them, but I never heard back. I had a little picture of them that I cut out from a game catalogue. I kept the picture under my keyboard cover.

But I digress. I didn’t just use the computer for gaming, although that was it’s primary purpose to me. I did a lot of my early writing on-line (still have quite a bit of it, though not nearly enough). I did a great deal of drawing too, using Windows Paint-Brush (sadly, I believe most of those have been lost. If I ever recover them, expect to see them on my webpage). I did some QuickBasic programming as well, and just a smidge of VisualBasic, which I didn’t like so much. And we played other games. The Legend of Kyrandia trilogy, which deserves a place with the Sierra Adventure greats. A variety of Sim games, a bunch of educational software (mostly The Learning Company). Another favorite: Commander Keen 1 - 6, including the elusive Keen Dreams! We found all the secret levels, baby. We made up stirring songs about our exploits in space and those little round robots in CK 2.

( *ahem*

o/~ Don’t hitch a ride on a gun-fi’, gun-fi’/Don’t let them make you go die, go die/No, hitch a ride on a red guy, red guy/hitch a ride on a red guy, red guy/ - with a piece of pepperoni pizza! o/~ ).

(Cause they were round and red, like pepperoni, see? Get it? Get it?)

You get the picture. I was a fangirl. Even now I have a “signed photo” of Roger Wilco on my wall. It’s black and white and says “Stuck on you like alien goo.” I won it by being the first to say “Antarean slime devil” when asked the name of the creature in front of World O’ Wonders. That was at a CompuServe chat with the creators. I’m really proud of it.

I was a loyal ( = obsessive) reader of Sierra On-Line’s magazine, InterAction. To the point where I lovingly bound the covers with clear contact paper so they wouldn’t fall apart. That was how I first heard much of anything about the on-line world. Sierra had a big network, The Sierra Network (later renamed ImagiNation Network and bought by AT&T. Later bought by AoL and made defunct). It was very graphical. You made up an avatar to represent yourself (just a face, but still) and there was a map where you could get to different areas, and in the different areas there were games you could play. Card games, board games. There was also a 3D role-playing dungeon. There was an adult area, but I never knew anything about that. Plus bulletin boards and e-mail. Those were pretty new ideas to me in the early nineties, sheltered life that I led, and I was really sold on them. I kept dropping hints around my parents about getting one of those magical “Modems” for our computer. I was endlessly happy when at last, sometime 1994ish, mom got a CompuServe account and I got to spend my own money on an ImagiNation account (you paid for a certain number of hours each month, and hourly rates if you went over). In early 1995 Jade introduced me to the wonderful world of BBSing (it was actually pretty much dead in St. Louis by 1995). In later 1995 I got a Delphi account and 100 free hour promotion of Prodigy. By the end of the year we had a real ISP, CRL. A while later we switched to EarthLink, which my parents still use.

So that’s how my on-line life began, but that is for another entry.

For now, I will say that I consider myself an obsie geek. I love obsolete computers. The Apple ][ series. C-64s. I think it’s a noble thing to pick up the pieces and preserve the history, because almost no one in our fast-paced planned-obsolescence culture is doing it, and there are dreams locked away under all those dusty keys, and they deserve to be remembered. That’s one of many things Turq helped to teach me that I believe in.

I’m frustrated at how difficult it is to preserve data over time and keep it from being lost or destroyed and keep it WORKING as new and different machines come out and old hardware gets dusty. It’s considerably difficult. I’m a big fan of emulation. I’m a strong supporter of much shorter copyright periods for computer software. I have a lot of respect for game designers and programmers, but I have no shame about downloading abandonware. Why not? Well, because once upon a time I bought those programs, I paid $30-50+ for them, and now the disks won’t read, if I can find a computer with a floppy drive in the first place. And don’t talk to me about how many are on 5.25” disks. No one is distributing these games, no one is supporting these games. It should not be freakin’ illegal to distribute them for free. No one would buy them.

Freakin’ macintosh. It doesn’t have a freakin’ floppy drive which makes emulation nigh impossible (I can’t find a floppy drive emulator). VirtualTek’s Virtual PC can’t run EGA programs properly for some reason, and their tech support is pay-per-incident (also something I’m strongly against. I don’t pay no one extra for writing buggy software). I never expected to lose the use of my desktop, but my monitor died, and not only can I not afford a new one, I have no place to put it in these dorms. That’s my biggest problem with hardware geeking. It can take up a lot of space.

*sigh* More later.