![]() A famous anecdote goes that the game proved so distracting it “set the entire computer industry back two weeks.” Dave Lebling, later a co-founder of Infocom, recalled : “For a couple of weeks, dozens of people were playing the game and feeding each other clues. ![]() As a result, it hit everywhere all at once, shared and re-shared from one system to the next, and soon became all anyone with computer access was talking about. While older hits like Hunt the Wumpus or Super Star Trek had trickled out slowly through mail-order paper tape or listings in magazines, and others like dnd were limited to niche platforms, Adventure arrived just as a critical mass of computer users began connecting to the ARPANET, the network of computers that would eventually evolve into the modern Internet. In May of 1977 Adventure became the first computer game blockbuster. On the screen of the tube in white letters, like the little voice that whispers in a wild gambler’s ear, this message stood: Here and there on the maps were notations-“water here,” “oil here,” and “damn that pirate!” In the midst of all this paper sat Alsing’s computer terminal. Webs of lines connected the circles, and each line was labeled, some with points of the compass, some with the words up and down. They consisted of circles, inside of which were scrawled names such as Dirty Passage, Hall of Mists, Hall of the Mountain King, Complex Junction, Splendid Chamber, Bedquilt, and Witts End. Strewn before me across the surface of his desk, like the relics of a party, lay dozens of roughly drawn maps. The author has been taken into a basement computer lab after hours to play Adventure, something of a rite of passage. ![]() “It was the hour of insomniacs,” begins a chapter in Tracy Kidder’s book The Soul of a New Machine, a snapshot of hacker culture at the end of the 1970s. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. Opening Text: YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |