It’s funny how some things just stick with you, like the summer of 1981. I had just learned to program the Apple II, using my middle school’s computers, and when the summer hit, computers were in my blood. Since I didn’t have my own, I ended up going down to a strip mall on the corner of Big Beaver and Rochester, where a Radio Shack was tucked amongst a grocery store and a laundry mat. Computers were new back then and the guys that worked the store were pretty cool. They’d let me come in and program the machines, typing in stuff from magazines or coming up with my own code. They’d also let me play a game every now and then.

You see, back then games came in Ziploc bags. You could open them up, play around with them, and put it all back without the costumer being the wiser. Now I asked this one guy if I could try out this cool looking game that had been around. He put me off for a while, but finally gave in giving me the disk to boot up. It took a bit to load, but when it came up I found myself playing my first interactive fiction game. The title: Pyramid 2000.

I never did get very far with that game as I remember, I think I got lost in the desert before even making it into the pyramid. The game was really an Adventure port to the TRS-80, changing out the D&D theme for an Egyptian motif. The drive access was really slow though, and every time I'd type in a direction I'd have to wait forever until it came back with me still lost in the desert. It was more frustrating than fun.

It wouldn’t be until years later, after I tried to write my own form of a text adventure, where I would run across Sorcerer by Infocom. What Steve Meretzky did with the time puzzle and all those spells, and writing that just popped off the page, that’s where I fell in love with interactive fiction and said to myself: one day I’m going to do this. But the first piece of IF that I ever played, well for that you would have to go all the way back to 1981 and that Radio Shack store. Boy, it was great to be a kid.

- D

Currently Playing: Alabaster