So, unsurprising, I was very excited by the project Tom at Flexible Factory has been working on recently. He has reverse-engineered the open source Jasper emulator, originally written in Java, and rebuilt it in ActionScript 3. From Tom’s account this sounds like it involved some pretty hardcore coding, but I’m glad he persevered as now we have Flasper, the Flash ZX Spectrum Emulator. It’s light weight, can be easily embedded in a browser, and it ROCKS!
Tom demoed this for the first time last night at Flash Brighton, the regular get together of the local Flash talent. Every time I attend one of these meeting I find myself blown away by the range and quality of work being produced across our small collective. It can be quite intimidating, I mean, if all you can show from your recent work is some pretty fractal effects, how do you follow a guy who’s been mapping and simulating the brain of a snail (Hi Peter).
Last night we also saw some sweet animation, an AIR Twitter app, and a Flash/ASP project called Communicator World, the work of unwrong, an Edinburgh company who have just moved down to Brighton. Welcome to the south coast guys, I think you’ll be right at home here.
But everyone’s work was great, so I shouldn’t single anyone out. The full list of last night’s exhibitors is on the Flash Brighton site.
Or Granddad’s Guide to Computer Games Part 3 (Part 1, Part 2).
I’ve recently left the games industry, off to focus on eLearning for the foreseeable future, so this may be the last of my curmudgeonly rants on how ‘Computer Games’ were so much better back in my day. My first post on this subject, a love letter to Braben and Bell’s Elite, which mourned the death of the creative ambition of the early computer games, has been one of the most widely read pieces I’ve ever written, so perhaps I’m not alone. But if you want to want to continue reading about computer games, without the nostalgic grumpiness, I recommend Si’s excellent chewing pixels blog, he’s the main man when it comes to the modern crap.
It’s probably a generational thing. I’m of the ZX Spectrum generation, turned on to programming through experimenting with one of Clive Sinclair’s babies – the ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum. This is why I understand the allure of the blinking cursor.
In 1983 we didn’t have desktop metaphors, we didn’t have mice, all we had was a blinking cursor. There wasn’t something to click to open a document or load a game, your mysterious machine just blinked uncomprehendingly at you, waiting for you to type a command. This is why I am a great fan of a dimly remembered genre of computer game called the text based adventure. Advances in computing graphics capabilities have meant the text based adventure is now regarded as a relic of computer game history. I think this is a mistake. The text based adventure is one of those genres that transcends medium – it is midway between a book and a game. It is a narrative in the form of a conversation, but not as a passive reading experience; you are responsible for one side of the dialogue, and to progress you need to keep up your end of the conversation.
If you’ve never played one of these games I’ll give you an example. The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy game, inspired by the 80s books, and written by Douglas Adams himself (who was a great evangelist for text based multi-media in the 80s), is one of the best examples of the form. It starts like this:
You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can’t.
It is pitch black.
And that’s it. Just that and a blinking cursor. It’s now up to you to try and communicate with the game and unlock the narrative. Your first command might be “turn on light”, “go downstairs” etc, but as the scene is being constructed in your head, rather than onscreen, it is only when you are arrested after leaving the house that you realise you have forgotten to put any clothes on.
It is a wonderfully absorbing way of playing. There is a version of the game on the BBC site, which will alarm the purists by its addition of graphics, but give it a try, see how far it sucks you in.
Another of the finest examples of the genre was ID, a game by Mel Croucher, one of most imaginative creators of the 80s for whom the modern games market would have no room. He didn’t create many games, but every one he did was pretty much a genre in itself.
ID had no graphics, just a percentage in the corner of the screen. There was also no opening message, just a blinking cursor. You had to start the conversation, with no clues as to what you were meant to be doing. Without giving too much away, it unraveled to be a dialogue with an entity living within your machine, who had experienced several previous lives. Your progress was marked by how much you could discover about this entity, by winning its trust and getting it to open up to you. The modern equivalent might be chat room grooming.
No-one is making these games anymore because nowadays we can create amazing graphical environments, so we don’t need text based adventures. This is illogical thinking; just because on film we can now create a CGI Spaceship it doesn’t mean every film has to have CGI spaceships in them. Not every game needs a realistic graphical environment to be compelling. Just look at the recent success of Sudoku. I think there is still a place in the world for the text based adventure.
I’ve recently seen someone has mashed the Hitchhikers game with Jabber, so it can be played as an instant messager conversation. With the popularity of text messaging, and the limited low bandwidth communications of mobile phones, I think there could still be a market there.
And before you ask, yes, I did try and suggest this to LittleLoud during my time there. I was laughed out the room.
So someone please, write a text based adventure for 2007, market it to the kids who love their AIM/text messaging, and make a million off it. You can buy me lunch as a thank you.
Growing up in the Midlands in the 80s, most children had to endure copious trips to Dudley Zoo. The only highlight of these visits, the dangled carrot that got you past the sleeping hippos, bored lions and the seemingly empty reptile house, was the arcade, which featured the original Star Wars arcade machine.
This machine was a classic. It had two killer features. First was the design of the cabinet “ a reclined seated position, speakers behind your head, an X-wing style controller in your hands, and the glass panel behind you which all your mates clambered over while they awaited their turn. At the age of 10 this was the nearest I’ve ever been to experiencing deep space combat.
Second killer feature – the vector graphics. They looked stunning at the time, and have aged really well. There’s something about the austere simplicity of those lines, which I’m sure must somehow tie in to my love of comics books on an aesthetic level.
So after playing on one of these machines for the first time in 20 years at GameOn, as well as Elite, Asteroids and the more recent shareware game Warning Forever, I left the exhibition demanding the return of the vector game. When even shoe-gazing is getting it’s second time around, surely vector graphics are overdue their revival.
Walking on, he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek’s opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them. “Like hackers in Bulgaria,” he adds, obscurely.
Why do I find comfort in this? Because I make my living as a programmer, which, to be honest, is an easy living if one’s brain is wired the right way. But I have always had the fear that, being in a job that relies so heavily upon brain power, it is a young mans game, and it will only be a matter of time before I am superceded by a new generation of kids with faster, more adaptable minds. A new wave of techno-savants who, having been around computers since birth, can talk with them as easily as they can each other.
But, the way Gibson frames it, this is probably unlikely. I am of the Sinclair generation, and we are a generation that are uniquely talented in my particular field. The young minds of today, while much more technically literate than I was as a child, experience computers as users, not as programmers. They experience computers as web browsers, admin tools, multimedia centres, games players, and desktops full of icons. Whereas all the ZX Spectrum gave you after boot up was a flashing cursor on a command line. And this has shaped the way I relate to technology as an adult; no matter how pretty things look, I am always aware of the 1s and the 0s that lie several layers of abstraction beneath.
This paragraph gives me comfort because it makes me feel … [sigh] … special.
ID had no graphics, just a percentage in the corner of the screen. There was also no opening message, just a blinking cursor. You had to start the conversation, with no clues as to what you were meant to be doing. Without giving too much away, it unraveled to be a dialogue with an entity living within your machine, who had experienced several previous lives. Your progress was marked by how much you could discover about this entity, by winning its trust and getting it to open up to you. The modern equivalent might be 
Growing up in the Midlands in the 80s, most children had to endure copious trips to 
This is a paragraph from 
Subscribe in a reader