I've been Booked!

I could be way off base here, but I was browsing through the books at Amazon.com and I chanced upon one called "The Rough Guide to Video Games" which, it seems to me, may well have cribbed off some research I did around 2005 or so. As a part of my "always in the works!" Teleblivion Web site, I put together a list of groundbreaking "Firsts" in the arcade world. This book had a small graphic that looked a little familiar to me.
Now, admittedly, it could very well be that they just used the same sources as I did. But this looks to me like a listing inspired by mine, at the very least. A few words have been changed here and there, but the spirit of the thing is the same. In any case, it's good to see all the interest in the classic games... more books like this seem to come out every year. Some capsule reviews are in the works for this blog. Happy reading!

My 2005 listing and chronology is available here.

What has keys but no lock?

Here's a little trip down melody lane: a web database entry for my old music keyboard, purchased circa 1987. What a high performer - not only was it a synthesizer (creating sounds synthetically was, even the salesman admitted, tedious) but a 16-bit sampler, which means you could grab real sounds using a microphone and manipulate them into instruments. You can see this new technology put to good use in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). The protagonist uses a "snoring" sound effect sample as part of a ruse to appear to be asleep in his bed (as he is obstensibly sick at home.)

There are also some interesting comments from site visitors about the device.

Anyone who knows me will not be overly surprised to learn that I still own this piece of 80's technology. Come to think of it I still have my PT-20 as well, a starter unit purchased circa 1981 (along with a tape recorder one of the first items I bought with my own funds, I believe.)

Then and Now

Inspired by this page showing an ancient Atari as compared to a modern notebook, and a general desire to brag a little about my latest PC build, here's a comparison of some of the computers I have known throughout the years.

Fall 1982 - the IBM PC
Technically known as Model 5150, this old boy celebrates a birthday this month; it was released in August 1981. The stats were modest - 4.77 mhz CPU chip, the floppy disks stored a mere 360 kilobytes (about 360 single-spaced pages of text), it could only display 4 colors in graphics mode (assuming you purchased the optional color graphics adapter at all) and it was expandable to only 640 kilobytes or RAM, which Bill Gates famously said "should be enough for anybody." In more recent years folks have chuckled mightily at this - RAM is measured in gigabytes now, of course - but I think he meant it was enough at the time. The PC came with PC-DOS (a version of MS-DOS), no mouse, no hard drive; and as far as sound goes, it pretty much could just beep. Really this was designed as a machine to run spreadsheets, display bar charts and process words, but some brilliant programmers did some really nifty things with it over time.

Summer 1988 - the Amiga 2000
I have a post from last year about the Amiga, and it includes a scan from a magazine article shortly before the Amiga (later named the Amiga 1000) came out in 1985. What a great leap forward in technology - this one stored 880K on a disk, had a 40 MB hard card hard drive, displayed an eye-boggling 4096 colors simultaneously, and could play polyphonic music in stereo using CD-quality digital sound samples. Ten years ahead of its time, it sadly faded into obscurity in fewer than ten years on the market (Commodore went bankrupt on my birthday in 1994.)

November 1996 - the mail order PC
I used and loved my Amiga long past its expiration date, and finally entered the world of Windows in 1996. My "Comtrade"machine had a gigantic (for the time!) 4 gigabyte hard drive (I actually ordered the "Fireball" hard drive by Quantum, but received the Quantum "Bigfoot" drive instead), the first CD-ROM drive I'd owned, and the much-touted Windows 95 (second edition.) It was alright - in fact I still have it and it works fine!

Summer 2002 - the Obscene Machine
The OM ("Obscene" meaning excessively powered/customized) was my first "build" - and a rewarding experience it was, despite some issues with the graphics card. Speaking of which, the graphics card had a built in TV tuner and remote and 64 megs of RAM (one thousand times as much as was in the whole IBM PC.) The OM itself sported 512 MB of RAM, a CD burner (later a dual layer DVD burner), 120 GB Western Digital hard drive (R.I.P.) and Windows XP, which I've found to be a truly decent and serviceable product out of Redmond. The OM got a motherboard, RAM and hard drive upgrade last year (SATA2 internal drive and external 1 Terabyte drive for offloading stuff when I inevitably fill up my machines.)

Summer 2009 - the Home Theater PC
This year's model boasts the following components:

Cooler Master "Centurion 5" case (courtesy of Craigslist "Free," this one made some lists of the best and quietest cases - not the tops of the lists, but still)

LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray CD/DVD drive plays and writes all formats including the defunct HD-DVD as well as the winner of the format war, Sony Blu-Ray (six times the fidelity of DVD, and stores up to 50 gigabytes on one disc.)

Silent but deadly ASUS video card with 512MB of RAM (as much as my whole computer a few years ago) and HDCP and HDMI ready.

Top-of-the-line Gigabyte brand motherboard

Solid-state OCZ Hard Drive (unlike traditional hard disk drives, SSDs have no moving parts to fail, so they are (in theory) more rugged, and definitely much faster than waiting for hard disk platters since they are all RAM.)

6 GB Mushkin DDR3 RAM (12 times as much as in the 2002 pc)

Intel i7 Quad-core Processor (got a great deal on this chip - and it has 4 cores and eight threads, so it trumps anything that came before it, not to mention all its other new features...)

The HTPC will run Windows 7, so I will be dodging the whole Vista debacle. Even though this gear will look archaic very soon, I'm having a ball with it, and can't wait to watch my first Blu-Ray movie on my new monitor!

The Realm of Hidden Things

Adventure games have a long and storied history interwoven with the history of computer entertainment. Starting in 1974 - the same year as pencil and dice game "Dungeons and Dragons" was first published - dungeon-crawl type games began to appear on college mainframes. System resources were limited in those days, and administrators would often delete games out of hand. The game pedit5 was an excellent example of this. You can tell by the filename that it masqueraded as a text editor program.

Following on the heels of pedit5, was dnd, also released in 1974, but in a programming space that allowed it to exist as a game. It continued to be supported and developed on the PLATO educational system until 1985. It continues to be played to this day.

In the summer of 1979, high school student Richard Garriott (known to his friends as "Lord British" due to his accent) programmed in BASIC his 28th dungeon computer game, dnd28b, released as Akalabeth. At first, he created it solely for his own enjoyment, then sold it himself in ziploc bags at the computer store he worked at. Later, in 1980, the game was published by a software company. Akalabeth (named for an Atlantis-like land in Tolkien's The Silmarillion) was very much a template for all of Garriott's later Ultima games, and the rival series Wizardry.

Rogue has probably spawned more descendants than any game to originate on a computer, (other than perhaps the hugely influencial mainframe arcade game Spacewar). So many in fact, that a new adjective was created to describe games in the genre: "Roguelike" games. The game was originated by two students at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1980. A third collaborator soon joined them, and eventually development of the game moved to another school along with two of the programmers (who then joined forces with another.) The game has been ported to almost every computing platform in existence, including the PalmPilot. The basic characteristics of a Roguelike are simple - Make your way to the bottom of a randomly generated dungeon, battling randomly placed creatures along the way, getting randomly placed better equipment and magic items, and leveling up (increasing your abilities and hit points). It's a simple formula, but the turn-based games of the early 80s directly inspired later blockbusters such as Diablo. What was great about Rogue was it was a different game every time - the creators wanted to make a game that would be fun for them to play, too, and could surprise them. And I'm sure it has!

Gamasutra article on Rogue (with some comments from the programmers at bottom)

Temple of the Roguelike

DiabloRL, a Roguelike based on Diablo (which itself was inspired by roguelikes)

Two from the 'Tube

Some thoughtful friends forwarded me some links to some retro game themed videos recently. Thanks, friends!

First, apparently in March last year, Pontiac released a TV ad based on the 1983 game Spy Hunter. Like everything else, it's available on YouTube, along with the Making-Of (which to me is even more interesting.) Few, if any, of the collaborators appear to be old enough to remember the game when it came out, but there you have it.

There is also this music video by "The Go! Team," the song is "Junior Kickstart" and the star is Ms. Pac-Man running around the streets of New York - whose denizens either don't notice a real life Pac-person, or seemingly don't think anything of it. Date of the video is unknown; the album the song was released on came out in 2004, but if you look closely you'll see the World Trade Center in the video, so it must have been filmed before that.

Finally, in unrelated news, I liked the following excerpt from an article entitled Do Men Really Want to Get Married?

For me, the light bulb popped on at a penny arcade, playing classic '80s arcade games with my girlfriend. Kris destroyed asteroids and hopped barrels with impressive dexterity.

But it was the grace with which she obliterated insects that sealed the deal. Spinning that roller ball, wiping out that quickly descending centipede with master firepower -- I had to marry this girl.

Can't Stop the Blocks

Tetris, an incredibly simple and compelling game, turns 25 today. People still play it. It's one of the most widely recognized tropes in gamedom. Even Google honored it in its Google Doodle:

There is a long and fascinating history behind the game, but I won't repeat it here. I will offer this small tidbit, however - if you've ever wondered where the name Tetris comes from, it's from the Greek prefix tetra, meaning four. Each of the shapes ("tetronimoes") that drop contains four squares in various configurations. As for the "-is," apparently that's a nod to creator Alexey Pajitnov's favorite sport, Tennis.

Till next time, happy gaming.... and remember, it's hip to be square!

Tetris in the Chicago Tribune

Tetris in Wikipedia

Windows 7 (and Windows 1 through 3)

Today's slideshow shows some of the design considerations undertaken in the forthcoming Windows 7, which we're all hopeful will help us forget Vista... heh. And it includes some images from Windowses past (see slide 3, 4, etc.)

CNET news