Christmas 1968. Apollo 8 is the first mission from Earth to leave the hold of gravity of our planet, the first to leave low earth orbit and enter the bonds of another celestial object. The three men on board are the first to see the earth as a whole planet and the first to directly see the dark side of the moon. On that Christmas, as they orbit the moon, they read the first 10 verses of Genesis.

25 odd years on Mike Oldfield completes his Songs of Distant Earth album, an album based on Arthur C. Clark’s novel of the same name.

At the start of this song we hear Lunar Module Pilot William A. Anders recite the first lines of Genesis while orbiting the Moon.

Sends shivers up my spine. Per Aspera ad Astra.

1959: Ike is in the White House, Reds know their place and the Stars and Stripes goes from 48 to 50 stars as Alaska and Hawaii become states. Vietnam is still just a former French colony in Asia, Elvis is in the Army and small towns are a Norman Rockwell painting where a bottle of Coke costs 5 cents. Here’s Johnny Preston singing about a kid on Christmas eve standing in front of a Music Store. I believe every word.

This landmark adventure game came out in October 1987. It was the brainchild of Ron Gilbert (of later Monkey Island fame) and the first game by a company called Lucasfilm Games (of George Lucas fame).

Within days of coming out it was more or less copied around Europe so by the time it got to Greece only a couple of months had passed.

That December, an unusually cold Athenian December, I made my regular visit to the local computer shop which had just received a new ‘adventure’ game, no other information available. I was 12.

I bought the game.

I trudged home to my beloved Commodore 64 that I’d massively upgraded a few months earlier by buying a disk drive for it.

(By the way, ‘Massive’ is appropriate since the 1541 disk drive was a HUGE sucker. As big as the computer. Don’t believe me? check out this pic. Those things on the left aren’t the computer they’re just disk drives. The Commodore 64 computer is actually within the keyboard itself. This was considered normal in those days. And dinosaurs walked the earth.)

Anyway, back home I wasn’t alone. As I sat in front of the screen while the game loaded, a cousin of mine and my younger brother sat beside me. New games were a big deal.

Finishing the first load, a graphic menu popped up and the game presented these ‘avatar’ profiles of characters, a bunch of teenage kids that where perfect stereotypes right out of some cheesy horror b-movie: The jock with a heart of gold, the smart school reporter, the science nerd, the misfit etc.

Each character had his back story and we where supposed to choose 2 to help us “Save Sandy” (whoever she was).

OK. We made our choice. Pressed enter.

And then.

You’ve got to realise that up to then, adventures were all done in text, and maybe, if you’d been exceptionally good, you’d occasionally get static pictures of the scene. You got a text description of a room such as:

“You are standing in a dimly lit room. You can see a table some chairs and a chest. There is a door in the North and another in the SouthWest. What do you do?”

And that was it. A cursor would flash and you would try combinations of words to get things to happen

“Open chest”

“Lie on table”

“Move chairs”

“Go North”

“Go Southwest”

or whatever and that was it.  The joke was that the grammar tended to be quite idiosyncratic so you often had to rephrase things just in case it wasn’t your idea that was wrong but your syntax or phrasing. These were cerebral games where the trick was in finding a way to overcome riddles, mental challenges and, yes, word tricks.

I realise the above makes these games sound not very good, but that was simply not the case. These games were brilliant and fun and a lot were -there’s no other way to describe them- art.

These games placed you as a rational actor in an imaginary digital (if only 8-bit) world. Not bad for the mid-80’s even if you had to stretch your imagination to fill in the unpixelated gaps.

Anyway, we knew what to expect from an ‘adventure game’ us three. We knew that pretty soon we would be up to our necks in good ol’ “Smash chest with chair” or “Smash chair with chest”.

In a couple of moments we would be trying our best to imagine how being in those rooms with these kids would be, trying to save Sandy from some b-movie horror without a name. Maybe by typing “Smash Sandy on horror-without-a-name” or “Feed Misfit character to Horror”.

Only we didn’t.

What happened is this. A little more loading occurred and then this video played.

And whatever we knew about what imagination and games were got obliterated.

Clearly, you could see the action. You were there. There was dialogue as in a movie. You clicked at places and the characters would go there. Why, this was like playing a movie.

Maniac Mansion flipped gaming as I knew it on its head.

We played a few minutes, and managed to solve the first puzzle, how to get into the Mansion, upon which point the game promptly ceased working displaying an error message.

We didn’t even holler in anger.

Realising this was a disk fault I immediately grabbed the disks and almost ran to get to the shop before closing time.

I made it just in time to have the game replaced.

As I walked home, a tad slower, it was already dusk and the evening was chilly. At a certain temperature there’s a sweet spot where walking becomes comfortable as it keeps you warm while the cold allows the mind to concentrate beautifully.

Maybe I’m projecting but I can still remember walking home and having this sense of knowing everything had changed.

These days, my cousin is a leading character animator, my brother is a computer programmer and I make games.

On the Road to Damascus.

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Easy one, my library.

Autumn of 1993 and while playing an RPG at the University of Maryland (note my showing massive unassailable geek credentials here) someone mentions this new girl singer -‘Milla’ something.
‘She’s also kinda pretty’ he adds.
As it happens he was kinda right.
Now, at that point we didn’t know this ‘Milla’ from the next girl yet the haunting lullaby was perfect for our gaming needs.
Just goes to show. Something or another.
So here’s Milla Jovovich singing a Ukrainian traditional lullaby.

Roll +6 for charisma bonus.