Back In My Day…
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IN THE COMPUTER DEN – Nick Forchani has been playing computer games for over twenty-five years, “long before you were even born.” Nick, a gaming veteran, understands how computer games and gaming have evolved, having played everything from Tic-Tac-Toe to Tropico.
Nick has seen some amazing developments in gaming over the years, but he doesn’t believe everyone else appreciates how much work has gone into the industry. He thinks that kids today are spoiled–they just don’t know how good they’ve got it!
Nick hears young people complaining about multiplayer interfaces, volumetric lighting, rasterized graphics, and music soundtracks, issues about gaming that didn’t even exist when he was a beginning gamer. In the “old days” Nick was playing 4K games on his first machine, a TRS-80 Model 1, built by Radio Shack in the 1970′s.
Nick is one of those few gamers that appreciates the effort put into making today’s games. Why? Because he remembers what it was like when gaming was in its infancy, when people struggled to make a decent living, and going to the movies apparently cost you a nickel.
“These kids are lucky,” said Nick, who still has his antique machine (which he had upgraded to 48K in 1981) in a downstairs closet. “When I was a kid, computer games took three hours to load from an old cassette player–if you were lucky enough to afford one. And if the volumes weren’t set right, we’d have to do the whole thing over again. A man thought twice before he decided moving on to another game. You loaded a game, and that was it! You played it, and you liked it mister!”
While Nick didn’t exactly have to travel 16 kilometres (10 miles) uphill to school during blizzards everyday, his first game-playing conditions would be considered primitive by today’s standards.
“Floppy drives? Pure luxury!” Nick exclaimed in a mock Monty Python voice. “Most of the games we played had to be coded-in by hand, and they were nothing more than random blocks of pixels blinking around on the screen. But we would play those simple games for days, because if we wanted to play something else, we had to type in everything from line 1!”
Nick thinks that kids these days are being coddled, and don’t appreciate how good they’ve got it.
“Most of the games in my day were text-based, and graphics–if we had any–were displayed using ASCII characters,” said Nick, whose favourite game is still NetHack.”Back then, we used our imaginations to make our games seem more real–more fun. You want to talk about gameplay? That’s all we had! There wasn’t room enough for expensive intros, fancy cinematics, and interactive cut-scenes that dressed-up a game like icing on a Bundt cake.”
Nick recalls the early text-character space-action games on his first machine. “There was nothing more satisfying than destroying a Klingon ship (represented by the letter ‘K’) with your starship Enterprise (as designated by the letter ‘E’), thus saving the starbase (represented by the letter ‘B’).”
“And back then, we couldn’t save our games,” Nick explained. “If our character died, we started a game from scratch, the way it should be! Finishing a game then was a real accomplishment. This creep-and-save stuff the kids do now? That’s for pussies.”
Nick thinks that the modern-day gamers who complain about the lack of realism in games, need to look back to the roots of gaming, and not take everything they have for granted.
“For the first three years, I didn’t even have colour!” Nick recalled. “Or grand stereo sound. Way back then, the PC speaker was all anyone ever needed to express the richness and essence of the game. Nowadays, if there isn’t a complete symphonic score accompanying a game, it’s considered a flop.”
Nick says he is impressed by visual gaming achievements such as fog, rain, and smoke, but be appreciates a time when such effects were created in a game by saying: “It is raining.”
He also has the same appreciation for the special effects in movies, which were often left to the imagination during an era when monsters were made of clay, foam, or papier maché.
“Don’t get me started on those,” said Nick, before installing an old Infocom text adventure on his PDA, a device that had more memory and storage than a garage full of Apple II’s.
