Game Machines


Ken Williams was one of the early buyers of a personal computer, an Apple computer. For a man who was used to dealing with mainframes that handled requests from multiple terminals, the “idea of this sleek, beige machine being a computer seemed in one sense ludicrous”, writes Stephen Levy in Hackers. So why did he buy one anyway? It was interactive, it ran pretty fast (the mainframe’s far superior speed was shared among multiple users, so on a per user metric, the Apple wasn’t bad), and it could be used “in the middle of the night”.

At this early stage, “hardly anyone had done anything on the Apple”. So Ken decided to implement the FORTRAN language on Apple. He had what is called the tools-to-make-tools syndrome.

And yet the “more significant revolution in computing was happening right there in his house”. Huh? It started when Ken coaxed his wife Roberta to try out a “really fun game” on the Apple. Back then, graphics were non-existent and the game was entirely textual! The game described a scenario (in text) and you picked an option (again presented in text). She was fascinated even by such a primitive game. Soon she was searching for games to buy, but found them uninteresting. So she conceived her own game with “puzzle, character traits, events and landmarks” on a stack of papers. “Look what I did!”, she told Ken.

Ken was dismissive. After all:
“No one really wanted to use a personal computer as a game machine – they were for engineers who wanted to figure out how to design circuits or solve triple-x exponential equations.”

But later, he warmed up. Who knew, he thought, the game might even make some money, fund a vacation even. He went and bought a device called VersaWriter, a tablet kind of gadget on which you drew (stick figures) which would then get translated into an Apple format. Ken then coded Roberta’s idea into a game called the Mystery House, figuring out how to pack the program (and seventy pictures) into a floppy disk! And thus began the first computer game company in history.

Fast forward to present day. Programming languages meant for kids are designed to write games, as I find with Scratch. I guess some things never change. Another thing I find that hasn’t changed is that most of the sample games you find for Scratch on the Net are obviously written by guys/boys: they’re all shoot-‘em-up or racing games. In those games, even the girly characters supported by the language, like butterflies, become (what else?) killer butterflies…

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