Aaron A. Reed's Blog, page 2

Trade Wars 2002 (1991)

If you first got online after 1996 or so, you might never have connected to a BBS. If you first got online after 2006, you might never have even heard of one. Reading the histories of online games like dnd (1975) MUD (1980), or LambdaMOO (1990) can give the impression that gamers have been happily playing together on the internet since the 1970s, and in some special places like university campuses, they have been. But for most early computer users there was no cheap or easy way to connect to the...

LambdaMOO (1990)

It had all started at the end of the ’70s with MUD, the original multi-user Dungeon, which successfully demonstrated the incredible appeal of sharing a virtual world with other people. By the end of the ’80s, text-based MUDs had become an established genre. As more and more university students gained access to computers and large quantities of unmetered Internet time, they created at first dozens, then hundreds and hundreds of MUD clones. The earliest were simple knock-offs of the original, but ...

Monster Island (1989)

The mailbox squeaks open, and the teenager’s eyes light up: amid the junk mail for parents is a bulky envelope from a company called Adventures By Mail. The teenager has waited all week for it to get here.

Inside is a trifold newsletter and a long stiff postcard, a New York return address on one side and a blank grid of rows with esoteric abbreviations on the other. But the bulk of the content is a stack of stapled laser-printed pages. While everyone getting letters from Adventures By Mail this w...

P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A. (1988)

On August 21, 1968, the Soviet Union sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia, bringing an end to a reform movement known as the Prague Spring. The movement in the fellow communist country had aimed to increase freedom of the press, allow for multiple political parties, and soften a Soviet-style system into a more modern and liberal democratic socialism. But to the Soviets it was unacceptable, an erosion of their dominance over the Eastern Bloc and thus their position in the gl...

Plundered Hearts (1987)

“Yuk!” began the review in Commodore User magazine of Infocom’s latest text game, something new for the company and, perhaps, for the reviewer: a romance. “Probably Infocom’s easiest title,” it concluded dismissively, in a tone matched by many other critics of the day. “There is, of course, a place for easy adventures,” wrote Computer and Video Games magazine: “after all, everyone has got to start somewhere.” Everyone here presumably meant women, the only plausible audience for an easy game with...

Uncle Roger (1986)

It’s 1969. A young woman in Boulder, Colorado is working for an engineering firm that’s building the Orbiting Solar Observatory satellites, the world’s first space telescopes. She’s there to help computerize the firm’s databases, not build satellites, but can’t help stopping often by the viewing platform overlooking the clean room to watch this glorious piece of hardware be assembled. “People entered in lab coats,” she reminisced later: “the thing was gold, it was shining, it was huge, it was in...

A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985)

Steve Meretzky stood at a podium in the New York Public Library before an audience of a hundred journalists, ready to introduce them to his new game. The Trustees Room in the famous grande dame of Manhattan featured “sculpted ceilings, Flemish tapestries, [a] marble fireplace, [and] rich draperies”; tea and scones were served on fine china to a limited guest list of gaming press; “port sherry and scotch on the rocks” were also available. It was September of 1985, the same week the original Super...

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)

Douglas Adams, at first, did not like computers. In fact he had built a career out of making fun of them with his Hitchhiker’s Guide franchise, which began on the radio before spilling into other media, most famously a bestselling series of books. Hitchhiker’s is hard to summarize, but one of its overarching themes is that technology, in the hands of big business and bloated bureaucracies, does not make life better: in fact it makes it far, far worse. Hence characters like Marvin, a robot given ...

Suspended (1983)

The box stood out on the shelves of computer stores like few others yet had. An injection-molded face mask — stark white plastic inset into the surface of the oversized package — stared out at shoppers browsing aisles of less memorable software packaging. Above the mask, the word SUSPENDED in bold block capitals, broken by a blood-red EEG brainwave. Behind the mask’s eye-holes, shadowed, were wide-open eyes. Those who bought the box, took it home, and opened it up would see they were part of a s...

The Hobbit (1982)

In Australia the academic year starts in January, so it was just a few weeks into 1981 when a computer science student named Veronika Megler returned to the University of Melbourne for her senior year. On the hunt for a new part-time job to pay the bills, she noticed a terse note pinned to the bulletin board outside the computer center: someone needed students for some part-time programming work. The pay was ten dollars an hour. When Megler dialed the phone number on the ad, it turned out the ma...