Aaron A. Reed's Blog, page 3
March 18, 2021
His Majesty’s Ship “Impetuous” (1981)
The Fifth West Coast Computer Faire in 1980 captured the personal computer revolution mid-explosion. Three hundred vendors and a crowd of twenty thousand filled two adjacent San Francisco venues packed with new hardware and software, evidence of an industry that hadn’t even existed five years before but was now rapidly expanding into the lives of everyday people. If you’d been wandering the aisles at that particular Computer Faire, you might have bumped into a man handing out unassuming tri-fold...
March 11, 2021
MUD (1980)
“Imagine you are playing an adventure,” asks an article in a popular computing magazine, credited to someone called Endora the Witch.
Let’s say you’re in a room of a house, you have found some treasure, and are now a bit stumped as to how to get it past the bookcase, which you can’t shift but which you’re certain conceals a secret passage. You have tried all sorts of commands to no avail, and are about to give up when up on your screen comes the message: “Tom has just arrived.”
Tom is “not part of...
March 4, 2021
The Cave of Time (1979)
In the early hours of a morning in 1969, in the middle of a long commuter rail trip from Connecticut to Manhattan, a lawyer edging up on 40 is scribbling a complex diagram in a worn spiral notebook. The diagram looks “like a tree lying on its side with many branches and limbs.” He ignores the view out the window and his fellow passengers on the train, other men in business suits like him, on their way to work. He is busy. He’s designing a book you can play like a game.
February 25, 2021
Pirate Adventure (1978)
In the overwhelmingly male-dominated world of 1970s hackers, a popular tale was the one about the wife or girlfriend who just didn’t get it. So-called “computer widows” didn’t or couldn’t understand what was so interesting about the bulky machines and the code they ran — or so the stories went — and sometimes lashed out in “hysterical” ways. One particular oft-retold anecdote went like this:
One day she had finally had it. I came home to find that she had put all my disks… in the oven. I was not ...
February 18, 2021
Zork (1977)
If Adventure had introduced hackers to an intriguing new genre of immersive text game, Zork was what brought it to the public at large. In the early 1980s, as the personal computer revolution reached into more and more homes, a Zork disk was a must-buy for first-time computer owners. By 1982 it had become the industry’s bestselling game. In 1983, it sold even more copies. Playboy covered it; so did Time, and American astronaut Sally Ride was reportedly obsessed with it. In 1984 it was still topp...
February 11, 2021
Adventure (1976)
In May of 1977 Adventure became the first computer game blockbuster. 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. As a result, it hit everywhere all at once, shared and re-shared fro...
February 4, 2021
dnd (1975)
In the early 1970s, in the midst of a cold winter in Urbana, Illinois, a high schooler opened the door to a university lab late one night. He’d been tipped off at a party that something interesting was happening on campus:
“The room lights were off. Cigarette smoke thick in the air, the ceiling disappeared in the gloom. Odd metal boxlike structures lined the room…. Dozens of people in the room, sitting in groups of twos and threes, hunched over each of the boxes, their faces weirdly lit with a st...
Subcutanean is on sale all week!
It’s the one-year anniversary of Subcutanean, my permutational horror novel of mirror universes, released on the mirror-date of 0202–2020. To celebrate, you can get your own unique copy of this book that changes for each new reader for 20% off this week.
One of the things I’m proudest about with Subcutanean is that despite being a procedural text project, reviewers have strongly connected with its story of self-discovery and identity. It’s got a 98% positive rating on Goodreads, and it’s been inc...
February 3, 2021
On the dating of two early CRPGs: pedit5 and dnd
The history of computer roleplaying games is often traced back to two early titles for the PLATO system: pedit5 (also known as The Dungeon) by Rusty Rutherford, and dnd (also known as The Game of Dungeons) originally by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood, later extended by many others. Both games are often dated to 1974, but I’m claiming a date of Fall 1975 for them in this week’s 50 Years of Text Games installment, and I wanted to show my work for why I think the commonly cited year is too early.
From...
January 28, 2021
Super Star Trek (1974)
The final episode of Star Trek aired on June the 3rd, 1969, just as superfan Mike Mayfield was finishing his sophomore year of high school. It was called “Turnabout Intruder” and it was not a very good episode. Trek had been saved from cancellation once before through a devoted letter-writing campaign, but this time it had proved harder to rally the troops. The show’s third season had been on the whole less inspired, and it seemed now to be going out with a whimper. A rerun of The Mod Squad scor...
