Contents
Letters
Editorial: Why CD-ROM Games Won’t Work
Chris Crawford
Live From the Secretarial Pool
Andrea Siegel
Book Review: Computer Adventures - The Secret Art
Chris Crawford
The Journal Reporter
Kellyn Beck
Death in Computer Gaming
Ken St. Andre
Ten Years Ago
Chris Crawford
Editor Chris Crawford
Subscriptions The Journal of Computer Game Design is published six times a year. To subscribe to The Journal, send a check or money order for $30 to:
The Journal of Computer Game Design
5251 Sierra Road
San Jose, CA 95132
Submissions Material for this Journal is solicited from the readership. Articles should address artistic or technical aspects of computer game design at a level suitable for professionals in the industry. Reviews of games are not published by this Journal. All articles must be submitted electronically, either on Macintosh disk , through MCI Mail (my username is CCRAWFORD), through the JCGD BBS, or via direct modem. No payments are made for articles. Authors are hereby notified that their submissions may be reprinted in Computer Gaming World.
Back Issues Back issues of the Journal are available. Volume 1 may be purchased only in its entirety; the price is $30. Individual numbers from Volume 2 cost $5 apiece.
Copyright The contents of this Journal are copyright © Chris Crawford 1988.
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Letters
from David Dunham
Doug Clapp’s piece in JCGD 3.3 was interesting because it touched on something I’d been thinking about, though his conclusions are different. I was struck by how SimCity was both mindless and intellectual. THAT, it seems to me, is what makes it a great game.
It’s mindless because you can just slap down housing tracts or bulldoze slums without thinking much about it. It’s fun to see the Sims build factories and get caught in traffic as a result. It’s intellectual, because all those brainless decisions about where to put the shopping malls matter quite a bit in the overall scheme of things. You can measure these decisions with graphs and demographic maps. And you can go back and forth between the two levels. Use only one lobe for a while, then enter crisis management mode and save the city from your brainless play.
A better way of looking at the game’s strength would simply be to say it can be played at multiple levels. My girlfriend built a city for the fun of destroying it. Her niece enjoyed making a nice city, with plenty of parks. I try to optimize everything. We’re not really playing the same game at all.
In contrast to Doug Clapp, I found Patton vs Rommel a trivial exercise in beating, not Patton or Rommel, but Chris Crawford. The reason for this was the fact that the game had victory points. I quickly discovered that victory points are what you needed to win the game. They can be obtained very easily if they’re what you’re out after - just be sure to ignore the sound military advice that your general reprimands you with.
The problem is that there’s a single way to score the game. That means there’s really only one game (unless you’re taken in with the illusion that you’re playing a military game). SimCity does have scoring, but it’s really not the point of the game. It’s also got subscores, which you can choose to optimize. Again, you can choose the game you’re playing (be the nice-guy mayor, or attain metropolis status as quickly as possible).
At first, I wasn’t sure what the point of SimCity was. I soon realized that part of the point was that you choose your own goal. This was something I’d been planning in my own unfinished game designs, but it was humbling to see it working.
Like Doug, I think computer games are a great idea, but found few to play. I now think it’s because too many have a single appeal (or even a single way to solve the puzzle). By making a game playable in different styles, you increase its appeal (some people really do play games to relax, while others want an intellectual challenge). You also enhance replay value, because the same individual will prefer different styles at different times.
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from Bill Kunkel
I have been giving much thought to your definitions of toys, games, and puzzles in JCGD Vol 3 #3 and, while I disagree with many of your conclusions, I believe you are on the right track.
Here’s where we disagree: we’re fine on the ball. It’s a toy, all right. But when you add a hoop, I can’t see that the result is a puzzle; the result is empirically a game. It is, in fact, called basketball. Whether one is competing against a player or not, it remains a game. Is the kid running around his driveway, all alone, practising free throws and jump shots engaged in puzzle-solving? No, obviously, he’s playing a game. Or is he?
What, exactly, is a puzzle? My first thought was that a puzzle is a test of some sort that primarily engages the intellectual, rather than the physical skills of the user. Fine and dandy, but is chess a game or a puzzle? Empirically, it is a game. What, then, defines a puzzle?
I think you hit on it when you talked about the addition of an opponent making a puzzle a game. But if a group of people sat together in a room, competing to see which one could assemble a jigsaw puzzle first, are they involved in puzzle-solving or playing a game? Why?
I believe the essence of gaming is competition, achieved through the application of a score against which other players may measure themselves. Someone playing solitaire for the purpose of making all the cards come out right, rather than for the purpose of obtaining a good score, might be said to be engaged in a puzzle, rather than a game. Or are they?
Both games and puzzles have rules. Toys have no rules, but are merely subject to natural laws. The crossword puzzle has obvious rules: wertical words go vertically, horizontal go horizontally; one letter to each box. When the puzzle is concluded, or solved, however, no score is available because the object of the puzzle is the solution and the object of game playing is to win.
I think the essence of the difference may lie more in the objectives than in the experiences themselves. One solves a puzzle; one wins or loses a game. We work our way backwards, therefore, and wait for someone to provide an example that renders this theory ridiculous.
But let’s return to my original question. The kid practicing his free throws, all alone in the driveway, is he engaged in a game or a puzzle? It might be a puzzle because his objective is to solve the problem of getting the ball through the hoop, rather than winning a game. If, however, he begins to keep score, he may be shifting into game gear. Or is each shot he takes a game, in and of itself, the object of which is to either win (throw the ball through the hoop) or lose (miss)? What about my solitaire player who isn’t keeping score but is simply playing until the cards all come out right? Isn’t she or he really puzzle-solving in that they are seeking a solution rather than a score?
Games may certainly include puzzles, as we have seen in countless video and computer contests in which the player must solve a series of puzzles to win the game (isn’t Fool’s Errand a collection of puzzles that become a game?) but puzzles can never include games (or can they? I’m making this up as I go along, so somebody stop me if I’m missing something, please.)
So what have I/we learned from all this? I think that the key is that puzzles have solutions and games do not. Once a puzzle is solved, it is finished. Games are infinitely replayable contests permitting and even encouraging individual solutions to one or more goals; whereas puzzles challenge the player to match the thinking of the puzzle’s creator. Games have goals; puzzles have solutions. Therefore, your ball and hoop deal is a game and not a puzzle, as I suspected all along, since there is no set methodology for putting the ball through the hoop, but a nearly infinite variety of potential solutions.
In any case, it’s a fascinating question and one of the reasons I enjoy the Journal so much. We rarely stop to consider the meaning and implications of terms like “game” and “puzzle” despite the fact that we make our living by creating and writing about them. Thanks for jump-starting my brain.
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from Stephen Linhart
Your piece on toys, puzzles and games in the last issue of the JCGD is a tasty morsel indeed. Your definitions have that "almost too obvious to even talk about" feeling of a really basic clarification, and the sequence from toy to puzzle to game is a pretty neat idea. However, I think the distinction between games and puzzles can be further clarified by adding a few more categories.
Consider the toss-the-ball-through-the-hoop puzzle, with an opponent. If your opponent can anticipate and foil your actions, you may have the game of basketball. But with the same puzzle and the same opponent you might simply be shooting baskets. This is a sport but not a game (basketball is both). The puzzle is solved repeatedly, with no significant variation and with no interference from your opponent. The challenge is to use physical skills to complete the puzzle as consistently as possible.
Similarly, sprinting against the clock is a sport but not a game. The track is the toy. The puzzle is to get from the start to the finish. The sport is trying to complete the otherwise very simple puzzle more quickly than your opponents. In the same way—oddly enough—Space Invaders is a sport. Once you know the solution to the puzzle (the winning strategy), the sport is to use physical skills to solve the puzzle with increasing speed and advance to the next rack of aliens.
Now consider the card game Solitaire. It involves a toy (the deck of cards) and a puzzle, but no opponent. Yet Solitaire is not merely a puzzle; it does not have a solution. If it were a puzzle, the casinos certainly wouldn't let you gamble on it. A solo game differs from a puzzle in that it is different each time you play and does not have a fixed solution. Rogue is a solo game.
Like basketball, Rogue and Solitaire require you to respond to unique and unanticipated situations. This makes them games and not simply puzzles. Basketball gets it's variation from the interaction between human opponents. Solo games get their variation from the operation of chaotic and unpredictable algorithms. In the case Solitaire the algorithm is based on the chaotic process of shuffling cards.
Toys are necessary elements of puzzles, and puzzles are necessary elements of games and sports. But sports may be games or not, and visa-versa. Sports involve the use of physical skills to solve a puzzle quickly, consistently or with good form. Games involve responding to unique and unanticipated circumstances in order to solve a puzzle. The circumstances in a game may be varied by the interaction of human opponents or by the operation of unpredictable algorithms.
But what do you get when you add plot, characters, sound, graphics and/or text to a toy, puzzle, game or sport? The possible combinations are all potentially interesting, most of them have never been named and most of them have never existed except on a personal computer. These are the possibilities which computer game designers have been struggling with as a profession, and THAT is our basis of competitive advantage.
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Editorial: Why CD-ROM Games Won’t Work
Chris Crawford
I once had an arguement with a friend over CD-ROM. He was all fired up with enthusiasm for the technology. Can you blame him? Here we have a technology that stores 550 megabytes of information on a platter that costs $1.50 to manufacture. Think about that. A typical CD stores roughly a thousand times more information than a typical floppy disk. That’s three orders of magnitude! Can you imagine the revolutionary impact of a thousand-fold improvement on any other aspect of computing technology? For example, suppose we could increase processor speed by three orders of magnitude, up to, say, 10,000 megahertz. What could you do with that kind of speed? Or suppose that RAM sizes jumped up to a gigabyte? Or what if the price of a typical home computer system fell from $3000 to $3? That would change things, wouldn’t it?
These were the kind of thoughts going through my friend’s mind as we talked. I was the pessimist who saw lots of problems. My friend declared that, within two years, compact disk technology would “blow everything else right out of the water.”
That was in 1983.
True, we have seen progress. CD-ROMs are now readily available, and we have our first entertainment CD-ROMs courtesy of Activision. NEC has released a videogame machine that includes a CD-ROM drive as a peripheral, and is already shipping some CD-ROM titles. The Headstart computer has been released with a CD-ROM drive built in. Next year we will see the commercial release of CD-I, a box with a CD-ROM drive, a 68000, and a megabyte of RAM. Both IBM and Commodore are rumored to have impressive CD-ROM hardware coming Real Soon Now. It would appear that the long-delayed CD-ROM tidal wave is about to inundate us.
A number of software publishers and developers have been preparing for this day. Electronic Arts, Sierra, Cinemaware, and Software Toolworks are all rumored to have made major investments in CD-ROM technology. New development houses have been tooling up to create the new software required for CD-ROM. Industry wisdom has reached the point of certainty: CD-ROM is the Next Big Thing. CD-ROM will revolutionize the entertainment software industry. CD-ROM will blow everything else right out of the water.
I disagree. I think that there are fundamental constraints on this technology that will hobble it for years to come. The three constraints I see are access time, development cost, and data intensity.
Access Time
Access time is a well-understood problem. Track seek times are measured in seconds; worst-case access times are five seconds. Average access times are still in excess of one second. Once the track has been acquired, transfer speeds are still little better than those of floppy disks.
Now, one might think that such performance, while regrettable, remains acceptable. After all, a slow floppy disk drive is still usable. The problem with this thinking is that it ignores the vastly greater size of the CD-ROM. The whole point and purpose of the technology is to provide megabytes of information. Sucking an ocean of information through a skinny straw intended for a glassful is not a useful exercise.
The problem is particularly pronounced with games. If you need some obscure bit of data available on a CD-ROM database, waiting a few seconds for the data is still faster than looking it up manually. But a game is not measured against such standards. It’s not as if all previous games are even slower than the CD-ROM games. And the user isn’t required to play the game in the first place. If the delays intrude into the enjoyment of the game — and they surely will — then the user won’t enjoy the experience.
CD-ROM programmers have responded to this problem with a series of clever innovations that dramatically reduce effective access time. I say “effective” access time because these are software techniques that work around the limitations of the hardware, not fundamental improvements in the performance of the hardware. The basic approaches all involve crafty organization of the data on the CD-ROM to insure that the chunks of data most likely to be called on next are immediately adjacent to the current track position. The result is software that appears to respond to the user with barely perceptible delays.
The problem with such schemes is that they distort the design of the game. In effect, these schemes transform a CD-ROM from a random-access medium to a serial-access one. The designers insist that random access is retained, but the smooth performance is only obtained when the predesignated serial path is followed. In other words, if you play the game in serial fashion, like a story, it works great; deviate from the intended path and the whole show gums up. The game designer who is aware of this problem will lean towards a more serialized product, with larger chunks of static data and less branching.
Now, this would be acceptable if you wanted to tell stories in the first place. But people don’t need computers with CD-ROM drives to experience stories. They need VCRs — and they already have those, thank you very much.
Development costs
The second problem arises from the huge costs of developing entertainment software for the CD-ROM medium. Now, software costs have been rising steadily since Day One. Currently, a top-of-the-line product will cost $100,000 or more to create. That covers the programming, artwork, sound effects, animation, and music. But CD-ROM is another story entirely. You’ve got to come up with 550 megabytes of entertainment to fill this baby; where you gonna get it? Program code will cost you something like $500K per megabyte; artwork will cost maybe $10K per megabyte. Sound, in large volumes, is cheaper but I don’t have good estimates for its cost. It is likely the CD-ROMs will be filled with digitized video taken by film crews with actors and cameras (some work along these lines has already been done at several development houses.) However, even this approach costs a great deal of money. It is very likely that a full-scale CD-ROM product will cost well over a million dollars to create.
The economics just don’t support such development costs. To earn back a development investment of a million dollars, you’d need to sell several hundred thousand units. That is at the upper end of what’s been sold in the disk-based world — and the installed base of CD-ROM drives is unlikely to approach the installed base of floppy drives for quite a few years.
Data intensity
The major arguement against CD-ROM games is neither technical nor economic — it’s theoretical. CD-ROM runs against the grain of good game design because it’s a data-intensive technology, not a process-intensive one. Interactivity, the essence of the game experience, springs from process intensity, not data intensity. Data can support and enhance the gaming experience, but it plays a secondary role. Processing is the core of a game, and CD-ROM does not enhance processing one whit. You can’t interact with data. You can’t play with it. You can look at it or listen to it; that’s all.
This is an abstruse point that I have had difficulty impressing upon people. The concept of process intensity is a rarefied one, and some people are all to ready to reject what they don’t understand. To make matters worse, I have done a lousy job explaining it, partly because I don’t fully grasp the concept myself. So let me try again. This time I shall use a more concrete approach.
Suppose I presented you with a movie on videotape. Glorious graphics and sound it has, with magnificent acting, brilliant directing, fabulous set design, and so forth. But this videotape has one restriction: it only works on a player with no pause, no fast forward, and no rewind. You may only watch it straight through. It would still be a great movie, but its interactivity would be nil.
Now suppose I permit you to watch this videotape on a regular VCR with the normal controls. The interactivity of the experience would increase slightly, because now you could go back and review good scenes, stop the action to consider it, or play with it in any fashion you desire. Of course, the amount of interactivity is still low, because your options are so limited. The experience is not very malleable. Besides, the videotape is so slow to rewind or fast forward that the effective interactivity is very low. We might call it a “90% serial access device.”
Now suppose that I gave you the same movie on optical media. The constraints are basically the same as with the videotape. It is still primarily a serial access device. You still watch the movie with the option to jump around. There is one small change: the access times to jump around are lower than the videotape’s. Now, if the access times were zero, then we would have a random access device, but they are not. This might be called a “60% serial access device.” The potential for interactivity is higher than with the videotape, because you can jump around faster. But we are still talking about a low-interactivity device.
OK, now let’s take the next step in the progression. What if you could actually change the movie? That is, what if you could change not only the viewing sequence, but also the actual content? Clearly, this would be much more interactive than merely being able to skip around.
A simple and dumb way to provide this capability would be to anticipate likely variations, film them along with the rest of the movie, and devise a scheme for permitting you to choose between options. This idea was first implemented more than twenty years ago. You could do it with a CD-ROM; it would be even more interactive than previous schemes.
But there would always be limitations on this method. There are only so many scenes that you can film, and only so many minutes of action that the CD-ROM can hold. So the interactivity, while better than earlier schemes, would still be limited.
A better way to let you interact with the movie would be to generate everything on the fly. Suppose that the scenes of the movie could be algorithmically generated. Suppose that the characters could be slapped together on command. Suppose that their appearances, personalities, dialogue, and so on were all computed at run-time in direct response to the actions of the player. This would be interactive! If the player wants to take the action off in some new direction, the algorithm could follow him more readily because it’s not tied to any mass of data on the CD-ROM.
Whoops! We just passed out of the realm of data and into the world of algorithm. You can’t process algorithms with a CD-ROM. You need a processor to do that. And a CD-ROM won’t do a damn thing to help you with that problem.
Thus, the CD-ROM represents a diversion from the path towards the very best games. It drags us away from algorithmic approaches and pulls us towards more data-intensive strategies. It therefore represents a wrong turn in game design
On the other hand...
This is not to say that CD-ROM games will fail miserably. Here’s my guess as to the most likely future scenario for the technology:
The installed base of CD-ROM drives will continue to expand over the next few years, largely because of their undeniable utility for storing huge special-purpose databases. Likely sales to such a small installed base will not be sufficient to justify the development costs. Nevertheless, a large number of publishers will invest a great deal of money in CD-ROM titles in anticipation of being well-placed for what they hope to be a major new market. These publishers will release some impressive titles starting in 1991.
CD-I will hit the streets at about the same time, accompanied by much fanfare and excitement. The stock of entertainment titles will be adequate and sales will be acceptable. The novelty value of the games will provide an initial surge of enthusiasm. However, the steep price will prevent CD-I from achieving high sales volumes.
For the next few years, the market will be driven more by promise than product. Some publishers will continue to pour money into developing titles whose sales do not justify development costs. Consumers will become disillusioned with products that don’t quite deliver the entertainment value they had expected, but will peg their hopes on the new product due out Real Soon Now.
By 1995, the shine will be off the apple. The marketplace will have decided that CD entertainment software offers much sizzle and little steak. The technology won’t die out the way laserdisks died out. With a firm foothold as a useful tool for serious applications, and a dedicated cadre of enthusiasts, it will hang in there. Instead of dying, it will lapse into a state of slow growth.
I think the experience of the national consumer telecommunications networks such as GEnie and CompuServe provides us with our best example of the likely growth of CD entertainment software. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, the networks settled down to the slow and painstaking task of building a market. They’ve not enjoyed the spectacular growth that home computers had in 1983, or desktop publishing had in the late 80s. But they’ve continued to grow year by year. I think that the 1990s will be for CD entertainment software what the 1980s were for consumer telecommunications. By the turn of the century, CD-ROM, CD-I, and CD-otherwise will be well-established, profitable, and abundant. The compact disk may well have supplanted the floppy disk as the primary medium for selling entertainment software (assuming ISDN hasn’t already bumped off the floppy disk.)
The important observation is that compact disk technology is not going to blow everything else out of the water. The CD is an impressive technology, but it has fundamental limitations (access time, cost, and data intensity) that will prevent it from running away with the marketplace. This revolution will take another decade to mature.
To make it happen, though, designers will have to get over their initial infatuation with all that data and start to design games in which the CD-ROM plays a supporting role instead of hogging center stage. This will be impossible at first; everyone will want games that show off the capabilities of the technology. Once we get over that phase, then we can start to use the technology effectively.
I realize I’m going way out on a limb here, predicting the development of a major technology over the course of a decade. I’m one of the few people with more than a decade of experience in the industry, so I suppose that qualifies me to make a fool of myself. This represents my best guess; it’s in print now, so we’ll be able to check my prognostications against reality as the years pass. Gulp.
Some Spectacular Failures
For those technological optimists who are ready to dismiss my predictions as fogeyisms, I’d like to offer a couple of cautionary tales.
Does anybody remember bubble memory? This technology, developed in the 1960s, relied on the admirable idea of moving the bits of data through the medium rather than moving the physical medium itself. Tiny magnetic field coils move streams of magnetic bubbles through a substrate. Each bubble stores one bit of information. The basic technology boasts several advantages over floppy disks and hard disks. First, bubbles are more robust than rotating media because there are no moving parts. They promised lower power requirements, smaller size, and lower cost. Moreover, because they are a miniaturizable technology, bubbles promised a steep learning curve with large payoffs once production became established. By contrast, rotating media were a mature technology with little apparent potential for further improvements. By the late 1970s, the industry wisdom was that rotating media were an archaic technology that would soon be replaced by bubbles.
It didn’t work out that way. Rotating media continued to improve year after year, always staying one jump ahead of bubbles. There was such a huge installed base of rotating media that the industry could afford to pour millions of dollars into research to improve the media, the drives, the heads, and the interface electronics. With all that R&D money, a fundamentally inferior technology was able to stay ahead of bubbles.
My other example is the laserdisk arcade game. The first of these, Dragon’s Lair, burst upon the scene in the summer of 1983. It was a sensation. With magnificent graphics and animation created by Don Bluth, the game was a smash hit. All the arcade game companies frantically commissioned laserdisk games, and by 1984 a number of these were on the market — where they bombed. Even though the second generation laserdisk games were much superior to Dragon’s Lair, they were still market failures. The value of the technology lay in its novelty. Once the novelty value was expended, people recognized that the game play just wasn’t there. The second generation games had better game play than Dragon’s Lair, but they still weren’t good enough to recoup their enormous development costs. Laserdisk games have been all but abandoned in the arcades.
On this point, I’d like to lay claim to having called this shot correctly. In the summer of 1983, when everybody else went gaga over laserdisk games, I was the only naysayer on the planet. Old Fogey Crawford harrumphed that the laserdisk was a data-intensive technology, and so could not provide worthwhile game play. The marketing sharpies and technical whizzes at Atari smiled in patronizing humor at Old Man Crawford’s silly theories, and made their decisions based on solid market research and proven technological capability. Well, they were wrong and I was right. Nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!
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Live From the Secretarial Pool
Andrea Siegel
[Andrea Siegel’s previous jobs include working for a rabbi and managing a cemetary. Her experience in the computer game field began three months ago when she became a secretary at LucasFilm Games.]
Copyright © 1990 Andrea Siegel
Can we talk? I mean, I’ve been examining and cataloging games from all over the industry for the Lucasfilm Games library, and avidly reading back issues of this journal; and I’m looking for a forum where I can plunk down some ideas about this game design business. And there doesn’t seem to be a Journal of Computer Games Designer’s Secretaries. So, below are a few thoughts that I’ve been knocking around.
A gut response to the interactivity-n-morals debate. First of all, about this interactivity schtick: what you’re really talking about is the illusion of interactivity. All the possible plot paths are pre-programmed by someone under thirty-five whose chief personal social interactive experience is derived from a biannual pilgrimage to the porn videos at C.E.S.
(And you say, “But what we’re moving toward, someday, is true interactivity.” Great, so I’ll get cyberspace blood, guts, gore, sex with plastic full-size Barbie dolls, and death. And how come they never talk about how true cyberspace would smell ?)
Hence, this designer-person doesn’t have the necessary breadth of experience to design a game that would give me the sort of choices I’d be interested in. So then you say, “We’ve got a very specific audience we’re catering to. They like to solve puzzles, to steal things (in a game context), to fantasy role-play, to run-jump-hit-and-kill (on screen), to pretend they’re flying or driving some-thing fast, preferably with guns attached to it.”
(I say, “Fine.” But out of the other side of your mouth you say, “We want to reach a mass audience, the euphemistically-called General Public. Those millions,” and I see dollar signs in your eyes, “of ordinary people who’ve bought computers in the last few years.”)
Your bread-and-butter audience find the activities listed above entertaining and absorbing. You all raise some moral questions about this. “Are we encouraging values that are not humane?” This is a sister-question to the twentieth-century coffee-table question: “Does Rambo and its ilk cause young Mikey to turn a submachine gun on his classmates?” This ties into a centuries-old Puritan suspicion about the nature of entertainment: that it’s inherently evil because it takes away from God’s work. This view is part of the millennia-old issue addressed in the Old Testament (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” frequently misread as “Thou shalt have no fun”).
I think the reason we, in the arts, turn over this rock again and again is that there are a multitude of juicy interesting worms underneath.
Chris Crawford talks succinctly about the classic games’ main character who “moves through the dungeon taking everything portable and slaughtering everything mortal.” Jim Gasperini gives us an outline of the underlying moral code: Kill first, ask questions later; steal anything; races and classes are inherently good or evil; genocide is sometimes essential; war is fun.
There is a real problem with casting aspersions on these so-called “corrupt values.” First, you sound like a preachy, moralistic prig. Secondly, the gap between what is moral and what is entertaining exists only because the games are hacker’s games ... the equivalent of Danielle Steele’s or Harold Robbins’s storytelling, not Virginia Woolf’s or Leo Tolstoi’s. Violence has its place in great drama. (King Lear says, “Out vile jelly” and blinds himself. Romeo and Juliet commit suicide. War and Peace isn’t about nice people being nice to each other nicely.)
Violence/conflict makes for action makes for drama and creates an audience. (How much of TV news is about peace?) The problem is that for people like me (and I admit, I may be the only one) who aren’t being reached who now own computers, the kill/steal/fireball value system is too linear, too heavy-handed. I don’t always need to mash evil aliens to feel entertained. NOT BECAUSE MASHING EVIL ALIENS IS BAD. It’s fine, it just doesn’t always entertain me. Give me repartee with the evil aliens, or evil aliens with fine qualities. And could there be some sort of ban on the hackneyed use of dragon-quests and treasure-hunts as an “adventure” format? Or the bigger question:
OK, so what does entertain me? Amanda Goodenough talks about “sexual conflict” — a juicy enough title for a forum for game design. But she gets into specifics and I get depressed. Quasi-interactive soap operas don’t appeal to me much more than quasi-interactive hack-n-slash.
What I miss, facing a computer screen, is the richness and resonance, the “interactivity” if you will, of a great poem. I’m looking for something more sophisticated, something that is worth memorizing, worth going back to the original text/game to replay; where the confusion is NOT a result of the designer’s muddy and imprecise thinking; where the frustration the game engenders is NOT a result of the player’s imperfect hand-eye coordination or typing the correct sequence of words. Rather that it is the frustration of plumbing for deeper meanings and richness, with that quest’s inherent rewards.
So the next time your secretary looks up at you with an opaque eye, remember, you’re boring the hired help. Our purpose, as Byron put it, “tis to create, and in creating live a being more intense.” I want games to be full of that “being more intense.” As any normal secretary would, “I love you to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace.” And as a result, I want more from you. And better quality “more.” And I want it now.
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Book Review: Computer Adventures - The Secret Art
Chris Crawford
This is a book by Gil Williamson. Gil is an old hand in the home computing business; I first ran into him in London in 1981. He and his wife Beryl have put together this book from the ground up. They wrote it, laid it out on a laserprinter, and published it. The result is a little book (128 pages) that covers the field quite well. For example, the section on plot elements includes paragraphs on possession of equipment, weapons, apparel, puzzles, bribery, geographical mazes, logical mazes, variable geography, one-way and restricted exits, secret exits, curtains and carpets, elaborate patterns of behavior, richness of methods, door openers, riddles, transportation, and much more. Gil is at his best here, explaining all the many schemes that designers can use to challenge their players.
There are chapters on idea generation, plot development, character design, game develop-ment, publishing, and the data structures used in adventure games. The book includes a biblio-graphy, a list of adventure game generators, and a checklist of major elements to be included.
The book appears to be targeted primarily for serious nonprofessionals who would like to create a saleable product with an adventure generation program. Nevertheless, this book might well have value for professionals. Gil has done a sterling job of sorting out and defining the basic elements of this genre. The only omission I detected in his book was the failure to mention The Art of Computer Game Design or this Journal in his bibliography. Hmph! Perhaps I should send him a copy...
The address is Amazon Systems, Merlewood, Lodge Hill Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU10-3RD, Great Britain. Gil wants £7.95 for his book. You may have problems sending dollars; the telephone number there is 0252-716669. He can, I believe, take VISA orders, which include currency conversion automatically. Call before placing an order.
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The Journal Reporter
Kellyn Beck
Your Tax Dollars At Work
Censorship is often a problem for filmmakers, broadcasters and the print media, so it should come as no surprise that the rapidly growing medium of interactive entertainment is facing a challenge from would-be censors. In February, the California state legislature saw the introduction of a bill aimed at restricting the content of computer and video games. This bill carries sweeping consequences for the software industry, and should not be taken lightly.
Sponsored by Assemblywoman Sally Tanner, the bill would prohibit the sale of any videogame containing references to alcohol or tobacco. The primary intent of Assembly Bill 3280 is to prohibit the depiction of cigarette and beer ads, but in its present form the bill would also make it illegal to show characters smoking or drinking alcohol in a game.
Steve Archibald, an aide to Assemblywoman Tanner and the bill’s author, says the bill was prompted by a newspaper article about coin-op racing games, most of them developed by Sega, with depictions of Budweiser and Marlboro ads along the race courses. Three of the games — Out Run, Hang On and Super Monaco GP — show Marlboro billboards and logos passing by the player’s car as he steers down the track. Another Sega coin-op game, Power Drift, contains Budweiser ads. When asked if Marlboro paid a promotional fee to Sega for displaying its logo in the games, Tanner responded, “Marlboro says the use of the logo was unauthorized. And Sega says it was accidental and inadvertent.”
All four of the games have also been targeted by the Georgia political action group Doctors Oughtta Care, which is led by Augusta physician John W. Richards.
In a statement released by his group, Richards singled out Super Monaco GP as an example of why his group seeks to prohibit videogames with alcohol and tobacco references. “When the game begins, the child is greeted with a full screen picture of a Marlboro race car. There are billboards and buildings with signs promoting Marlboro, and even the windows of the buildings have Marlboro signs where the windows should be.”
Archibald says Tanner’s bill would prevent ads in videogames which might influence children to use alcohol and tobacco. “Existing law prohibits selling or giving away tobacco products to a minor. Existing law also prohibits the distribution of harmful matter which appeals to the prurient interest of a minor.”
The legislation is intended to make sure that no videogame has the potential for influencing children to use alcohol or tobacco. The bill would make the sale of games with references to alcohol or tobacco products a misdemeanor.
As it is presently worded, AB 3280 would make any depiction of alcohol or tobacco products illegal in a videogame, and it defines a videogame as “any interactive electronic amusement device”. The following paragraph is an excerpt from the bill:
No person or business shall sell lease, rent, or provide, or offer to sell, lease, rent, or otherwise offer to the public or to public establishments in this state, any video game intended for either private use or for use in a public establishment and intended primarily for use by minors, which contains, in its design and in the on-screen presentation of the video game, any reference to alcoholic beverages or tobacco products, including, but not limited to the depiction of alcoholic beverage or tobacco product containers or other forms of consumer packaging, particular brand names, trademarks, or copyrighted slogans of alcoholic beverages or tobacco products.
The bill will have its first hearing April 3, when it is scheduled to be considered by the assembly public safety committee.
Any attempt to pass legislation censoring the content of computer games should be viewed with alarm, because the interactive entertainment medium, although less well established than the print and broadcast media, should be protected by the same First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. Such protections should be nurtured and guarded with great care. Interactivity, used wisely and responsibly, can become a powerful tool for mass communication and education, as well as for entertainment. But freedom of expression is integral to that growth, and should be defended against all attempts to censor it.
On the other hand, such protections must be deserved. We as producers of interactive entertainment must show ourselves worthy of First Amendment guarantees by making responsible creative decisions in product development, especially where young audiences are concerned. The excessive depiction of cigarette and beer ads will not win respect from the public, nor is it likely to win loyalty from teenage consumers.
MicroIllusions’ Financial Woes
We reported last month that Microillusions was rumored to be closing its doors, and since then other computer publications have reported that the company has filed for bankruptcy.
JCGD contacted the Granada Hills, California, firm to check out the rumors, and a spokesman told us the company “is still functioning after a period of reorganization at the beginning of the year.” Phil Moody of Microillusions said the company had moved out of its former offices to a temporary location and was still shipping products, as well as developing several new software titles and hardware products for release next quarter.
Among the company’s recent releases, according to Moody, is the game Laser Squad, with Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64 versions which shipped in January and February. Soon to be released are “Genesis”, a video program for generating animated fractal landscapes, and a high resolution, 32-bit color video card for the Commodore Amiga.
Moody says rumors about the company’s demise began circulating soon after a program of cutbacks were instituted, including a 50% staff reduction, termination of the company’s toll-free phone number, and the office relocation. Adds Moody, “Microillusions is still functioning and we feel the period of reorganization has improved the company.”
Vaporware comes to computer games
The word “vaporware” entered the vocabulary of the computer industry in recent years as it became more and more common for large -scale productivity software projects to lag many months behind scheduled release dates. Some projects have spent up to a year or more in vapor, and computer publications print lists of vaporware products along with the number of months the product has been in vapor.
Until recently the computer game industry managed to avoid the vaporware problem. But during the past year a number of announced games have joined the ranks of vaporware, raising the issue of how the problem will affect the marketing of computer games.
Take, for example, Chris Crawford’s game “Guns and Butter”, which was first described in the pages of BYTE magazine in May, 1989. Although the program has been complete for some time, there is still no firm release date for it.
Another game that has seen reviews printed before being completed and shipped is Brian Moriarty’s “Loom”. Or what about the Infocom graphic adventures such as Shogun and Journey, or Red Storm Rising? These games were all seriously late and eagerly awaited. And let’s not even talk about Return to Atlantis.
The vaporest of them all has got to be Harpoon. This monster game from Three Sixty went through several developers over the course of three years before it saw the shelves.
There’s a reason for the increase in game vaporware. Games have grown larger and more complex over the last few years. Game projects now require large teams rather than individual efforts. Game project managers, unfamiliar with the difficulties of handling complex projects, underestimate the time required to deliver. Deadlines slip. Welcome to the big time.
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Death in Computer Gaming
Ken St. Andre
I’ve been reviewing computer games all year instead of designing them. In that capacity I’ve become aware of a problem in computer gaming, especially in FRP computer gaming which is my main love, but also in other game genres as well. namely, the problem of Death to the players. I’d like to explore that topic for a while. If you’re with me, read on.
First, I’d like to get some disclaimers out of the way. My games (Tunnels and Trolls, Stormbringer, Wasteland) are not deathfree games. As a designer I’ve been known to take just as much joy in killing off my players as anyone. I still believe that there are some times when game death is appropriate for a player, and at those times the Game Master, whether human or program, should award that game death without even a backward glance.
But, I have changed, and I no longer believe in unnecessary or gratuitous game murder, and I’d like to bring more computer game designers to see that point of view.
What is the fun of a computer game? Is it fun to be killed over and over again while attempting to battle your way through a killer program against all odds? I think not. I know that as a player I get discouraged and quit playing after being killed so many times. Is that what we as designers want? To defeat our players so often that they give up on our game forever?
I think not. Ideally, we’d like to create a game so absorbing and so fascinating that the player will get lost in the game world, and only be able to tear himself away from it with greatest difficulty. At least, that’s what I’d like to create.
Then why do we treat our players so badly, kill them off, and kick them out of our games so often? Because we don’t really think about what we’re doing — we just blindly follow the patterns of the past.
One of the big patterns of the past that is still influencing computer game design is Arcade Gaming. Arcade computer games are designed to do just one thing — separate the player from his money, make him keep feeding quarters into the slot. To accomplish that purpose they all start slow, letting the gamer get the feel of the game experience, get a taste of some of the graphic treats in store, and then they quickly get more and more difficult until the player loses all his game lives and has to pop more money in the machine. When those games are translated from the arcade to the personal computer, they come across unchanged, even though the original purpose of the game (i.e. collecting quarters) no longer is valid. The gamer has paid for his pleasure with his purchase. There is no need to make the game so hard to beat that it keeps killing the player off in the low levels.
I have an example of this sort of senseless killing in an arcade game. Zany Golf from Electronic Arts is a beautiful little simulation of Miniature Golf. It contains 18 wacky holes, and is almost realistic enough to make you believe that you are out there on the greens, wacking the ball around. But, if you ever fail to sink your putt in the maximum allowable number of strokes, your game is ended and your player is effectively dead. Someone like me with rotten hand-eye coordination is never going to get through all 18 holes without dying somewhere on the way. So, because I can’t sink the putt on the anthill, I get booted out of the game. That’s completely senseless. Real minigolf doesn’t boot you off the course if you can’t manage a hole. You just take the maximum score, usually 5, for that hole and go on to the next one. The true object of minigolf is to get the lowest score©©not just to complete the course. I have heard it argued that game death is justifiable in a game like Zany Golf so that the player won’t see everything there is to see on his first play, and will want to play again and again to see the rest. I don’t buy that argument. After a certain number of frustrations, usually around 6 or 7 for me, I get so mad at the game that I put it away and never play it again. On the other hand, if I had managed to play all the way through, I might have had no incentive to try again to see other holes, but I would have had a pleasurable experience. I might want to play again and again just to try and beat my previous scores. I would have been immersed in the Zany Golf world for an average of 30 minutes at a time instead of 10. When friends come over, I’d bring out the Zany Golf so we could all play a round. Game death in Zany Golf is totally unjustified.
Outrun, a kind of super racing game, is the same way. The designers and programmers went to incredible trouble to fill the Outrun world with lavish graphics, great sound effects, challenging corners, but after my allowable 5 wrecks, the game is over, usually only about one quarter of the way through the entire race. Am I frustrated? You bet. Do I like the game? Despite its many good features, I hate it. Did the designers really do anything new with Outrun? NO! It’s just another ripoff of Atari’s Pole Position game from the late seventies. At least in the arcade we got to sit inside the game machine, use a steering wheel, a gearshift, and a brake.
Another big source of computer gaming is the fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. All the role-playing games, regardless of genre, developed from the seminal ideas of Dave Arneson and his friends back in the early seventies. People are writing role-playing games today who never heard of Arneson or Gygax or St. Andre, and have no idea where the concepts they use so blithely came from.
Those original FRP games were basically hack and slash games where the object was to kill as many monsters and grab as much loot and make yourself as powerful as possible. We all went through that stage. Some games, and some gamers never got beyond it. When the game made the jump from pencil, graph paper, and dice to personal computer, it stayed a hack and slash game. The only difference is that there’s no way to sweet talk the computer when you get in a jam, whereas a human GM just might let you talk your way out of a pickle. As FRP gaming developed into carefully plotted out storylines that demanded a continuing cast, GMs learned to fudge the die rolls a little, keep those players alive and going, on to the next horror or challenge. A man who has spent 50 hours plotting an elaborate adventure campaign doesn’t want to ruin it all by killing all his players at the beginning. Sure, he may off a player character here or there, especially when the player himself is too dense, too unpopular, or too lousy at role-playing to contribute to the enjoyment of the group. But, there are other members in the party who can carry on, and a player can always roll up a new character, rejoin the party somehow, and carry on with the campaign. Computers don’t care how the campaign comes out. If all the players get killed, it’s back to square one to start over.
Let me give one current example of an otherwise excellent game that falls into that trap. Curse of the Azure Bonds from SSI is their best adaptation of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to this point. The game contains a complex plot, a storyline capable of picking you up in places and carrying you right along, a virtually infinite variety of character types, weapons, magic, etc. As a player you are limited only by your own imagination. The object of the game is to rid yourself of five magical geases. While doing so you may enjoy yourself in the beautifully developed D & D world, meeting strange peoples, fighting strange monsters, exploring a fascinating geography. However, all that depth in world creation takes a back seat to practically endless tactical combat against ever more hopeless odds. In fact, in an article in Computer Gaming World, the people at SSI admitted that they stacked the dice against the gamers - a deliberate bending of the rules to try and kill the players. Worse than that, they have made the game such that you can fairly easily waltz into an evil stronghold, get the geas removed, and then have to fight your way through ten times the original number and power levels of foes simply to get back out into the world. Of course, you can save the game, and try again when you get killed, but it doesn’t do much good to save just before a hopeless situation, and then go back and get killed again and again and again. Needless to say, although I liked many things about the game, I’ve quit playing it, and I’ll never see at least half of the good things they put into it.
A third type of game that tends to kill off its players unnecessarily is the Infocom-style adventure. Many of these games used to have just one successful path through all the many twistings and turnings of the game map or the interactive fiction. Take a wrong turn and whoops, the path crumbles underneath you, dropping you into a pit full of vipers, and you’re dead. Fail to solve the puzzle in ten seconds and the witch comes into the cave and catches you. You can’t fight, you can’t run, and you can’t bargain with her. You’re just dead and out of the game.
I’m not saying that all computer games do this murder to their players. There are many excellent games that give their players every chance to stay alive. If all of your players get dead in Ultima, Times of Lore, or Wasteland, then you know you really blew it badly, and you can go back to your last save with a very good chance of playing past that particular stumbling block. The same cannot be said for CURSE OF THE AZURE BONDS or DEATHBRINGER.
Note that there are plenty of computer games that do not rely on death to defeat the players. Sports simulations are perhaps the best example. You can play a game of baseball or hockey or chess and you may win or lose, but the game is not cut short by the untimely death of your electronic alter©ego. You get to see and enjoy the whole thing. Various simulations are another example. SimCity which is currently so popular, doesn’t execute your player, or kick you out of the game, if you build a lousy city. I do believe that part of that game’s popularity comes from the fact that no matter what you do, you can’t be killed for it.
I wouldn’t bring up the problem if I didn’t think there is a solution to it. For the arcade style games, let the player see the whole thing. He can play against the clock, or against the score, or against a computer player that is competing with him. For games like Gauntlet or Barbarian, tell the player how to get infinite lives in the game, and then give the player that choice. If the player wants to play the rigorous version with only three lives, he can, but if he just wants to see all the monsters, traps, and scenery, then he could do that, too. Remember, you’re not getting any extra quarters by killing him. He has already paid for the game.
For FRP and adventure style games the solution is even simpler. Only kill the player when he has blown things so badly that there is no possible way to recover. Instead of having that monster kill the outmatched warrior, let him be knocked unconscious and dragged off to a lair or a cell, or let some computer©controlled NPC come to the rescue and save our unfortunate character. Yeah, I know, such things might be a little harder to program into the game, but they would be worth it. As a game designer, don’t you find it far more satisfying to have your players on tenterhooks wondering what is going to happen next, than to just eliminate the bloke and make him start over?
Again, I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of good games out there. What I am saying is that there are too many potentially good games that have been ruined by the designer’s short©sighted policy of killing off his players unnecessarily. When making your next game, please stop and think, is this game death really necessary? What do you and the player really gain from this game death? If you don’t have a good answer, then don’t do it.
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Salary Survey Time!
It’s been two years since we last ran a successful salary survey. This time I am making it a little easier by including this self-addressed form. All you have to do is fill in the blanks, tear it out, fold, staple, stamp, and mail. You can do it in five minutes’ time. I very much hope that you will take the time to fill out this salary survey; the more respondents we get, the more reliable our results will be. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn that you are grossly overpaid and had better start making nice to the boss... yeah, sure.
First and most important is your annual income for 1989. Even if you don’t have anything to do with games, I still want this information, because it will serve as a useful basis of comparison. If people are making more money dreaming about designing games than making them, that’s something everybody should know. I want to know your effective income, not your gross income. In other words, if you were paid $200,000 by a major publisher, but had to give $160,000 to your partners, your effective income was only $40,000. Take your gross income and subtract all your business expenses. Do not subtract such things as mortgage interest on your home.
Your 1989 effective income:__________________________
Next comes your job description. I have boiled all the many job descriptions in this industry down to just four basic jobs. I realize that nobody fits these descriptions perfectly, but I ask you to check the one that most closely fits your situation:
• Wannabee: You don’t work professionally in computer games. Your primary source of income is something else. You work on computer games on the side, but someday...
• Designer: check this box only if you have primary design control over your projects. You are the person who makes all the important decisions about the game. Perhaps you also write the software, or perhaps you delegate some of the creative decisions to specialists who make the program, art, or sound.
• Implementer: You are the person in the trenches who actually builds product. You do not have primary creative control over the design; there’s a project leader, lead designer, or other senior person who runs the show. You are a programmer, an artist, a sound expert, or other specialist.
• Manager: Your task is to coordinate the activities of the people who create the product. You have creative input, but not direct or primary creative control. You might be called a producer or a product manager.
_______Experience: please enter the number of years that you have been professionally involved in the computer games industry. Do not count years spent in related fields such as programming, moviemaking, or stable cleaning.
_______Age: this is where we get an idea of how seasoned you are compared to how many years experience you have. We’ll assume your career started at age 22.
• Self-employed? Check this box if you are self-employed.
Results will be published in the next issue of the Journal.
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Ten Years Ago
Chris Crawford
Well, children, gather round ole Grampa Crawford and listen while he tells you about the good old days of computer games. Yep, it was back in the Seventies that I got my start, back when there were cowboys and injuns and BASIC. Yessiree, those were the days, when men were men and programs were in machine language and..well, I forget.
Now then, (ptooey) games were around right from the beginning. Of course, back in those days, games on computers were much simpler than they are today. They were really more like cute little demonstrations of what the computer could do, or programming exercises for the beginner. Maybe that’s one reason why games today are still treated like some kind of sleazy programming. Either way, they were pretty simple.
The first personal computers were of two types: the single-board computers and the S100 machines. They all had maybe a K of RAM — yep, that’s right, one thousand and twenty-four bytes of RAM. Most of ‘em had a few hundred bytes of bootstrap ROM to load up some simple operating system. I/O consisted of a keypad or bank of switches and some LED’s. It was rough, but it was good enough for starters. All this was around 1976 and 1977.
Now, you might wonder how we managed to do games on those machines. Well, it took some real imagination. Take the KIM-1, for example. (ptooey) That durn KIM-1 had only six seven-segment LEDs and a 21-key keypad. But people were still able to do games for it.
There was Lunar Lander, one of the simplest. You had to land your lunar module on the moon, and you were falling straight down, and you controlled the burn rate of your rocket. It was a first-order differential equation, nothing more, but it sure did impress people. You got a readout of your position (two digits), your velocity, (two digits) your fuel supply (one digit), and your burn rate (one digit). As Spock used to say, “Simple but effective.”
We had other games, too: Hunt the Wumpus, BlackJack, Farmer Brown, Hangman, Shooting Stars, and so forth. Farmer Brown was what you might call a skill & action game, if you were charitably inclined. There were six little patterns representing an ant, a bird, a cow, a dog, an elephant, and a fox. The program would try to run one of these patterns across the LED display. You had to recognize which one it was and call out its name (by pressing the appropriate key from the keypad) to scare it away before it made it to the opposite side of the display. I spose it’s not as exciting as Their Finest Hour, but it shore beat shucking corn on a Saturday night.
I spose you younguns would think these games were pretty dumb, but we thought we were pretty smart cooking them up. I mean, just getting anything working at all was quite a challenge back in those days.
But things were changing fast. In 1977 we had three new computers that showed the future. They were the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II. There were lots of other computers, but they never got anywhere. The TRS-80, the PET, and the Apple were the winners.
What was remarkable about these computers was that they were appliances. I mean, before them, you had to be pretty good with a soldering iron to own a computer. You had to build it from pieces. These guys were selling the complete package for under $1000! It was great! I mean, these babies were loaded. They had an operating system and ROMs with BASIC built in, their own CRT displays, a ton of RAM (well, at least 4K of it), and even a built in tape cassette for saving programs. Here was the whole shebang.
A lot of people don’t realize, though, that the Apple got off to a slow start. In the early days the horserace was between the PET and the TRS-80. The PET had a 6502 while the TRS-80 used a Z80. The Apple was nowhere to be seen; it was too gol-darn expensive to sell. In fact, it wasn’t until Visicalc set in in ’80 and ’81 that the Apple really got going— but that’s another story.
These appliance computers spawned the first commercial software. In the earliest days, software was something that you typed into your keypad, maybe from a listing in a magazine or newsletter. But the appliance computers made software a consumer item, and allova sudden people were writing programs and selling them in stores. Now, don’t get me wrong — there were no software publishers or anything like that. If you wrote a program, you duplicated some cassettes, typed up and photocopied a manual, and stuffed the whole thing into a ziplock bag, and then sold it to whomever would take it.
Marketing in those days was a kind of seat-of-the-pants experience. When I did TANKTICS, my advertisting campaign consisted of a full-page ad I placed in a user’s group newsletter; cost me mebbe $50. I went around to computer stores and wargame conventions, showing off my game and selling copies. Most sales, though, came from reviews. There wasn’t much software out there in those days, so anything new got a review. I sold 150 copies of TANKTICS that way.
There were other efforts like mine. Somebody in Canada did a neat little game called Warlords. Jon Freeman and Jim Connelley started up a company based on their efforts to bring role-playing games to the computer; they called their company Automated Simulations. (It later became Epyx.) Their first game, though, was a tactical space combat game. There was a group in Massachusetts called Personal Software that did a game called MicroChess. (ptooey) They later did something called VisiCalc.
There were no publishers in those days, at least none like today. You had to self-publish your stuff because there wasn’t anybody else who would do it for you. There were no software retailers like Egghead or Babbage’s. Software was sold mostly by mail order directly from the programmer to the user. There were plenty of magazines and newsletters to get the word out, and mail order was the established way to sell.
There were some computer stores, of course, but they weren’t like the slick chains you see nowadays. They were more like hobby shops run by enthusiasts. They’d sell some hardware and whatever software they could find. The software was normally set up on pegboards, because almost everything was in a ziplock bag. There weren’t many software packages in boxes.
I had a job in 77-79, for the University, where I travelled all over Northern California. That job gave me an opportunity to visit a lot of computer stores. There was one in every big city, sometimes two. The small towns, though, they didn’t have much. Nope, they weren’t very common, and every one was the creation of its owner. Some of ‘em liked Apples, and some liked PETs, and some liked S100 machines.
Games were a lot cheaper back then. I sold TANKTICS for $15, and later on I sold LEGIONNAIRE for $10. All the games sold for less than $20. Everything was on cassette, and a lot of games were written in BASIC. Piracy wasn’t considered to be a problem because nobody expected to make much money off the software in the first place, and besides, copying a cassette tape with programs and data on it was a tricky operation, especially when they seldom worked in the first place. Hmph!
Graphics and sound weren’t much to write home about. They PET and the TRS-80 both had black and white text-only displays. The PET had 24 lines by 40 characters. The TRS-80 had 16 lines by 64 characters, I recall. You did graphics by writing characters to the screen, and each machine had, in addition to the regular ASCII character set, a set of special graphics characters.
The big graphics extravaganza in those days was a game for the TRS-80 called Android Nim. It was just nim, but it sported rows of little animated robots. These guys actually moved around while you played the game! They’d move their heads back and forth and roll their eyes and open and close their mouths, all while they were waiting for you to make your move. It was pretty sensational stuff. I was pretty jealous that Android Nim got all the press attention, while my games, which were much deeper but not as flashy on the graphics, didn’t get as much coverage. Heh, heh, just goes to show, some things never change, do they?
That’s the way things stood as the 80s dawned upon us. Funny thing, I can’t recall many people who had actually published anything in the seventies who are still with us. Besides me, there’s Old Man Freeman and there’s Jim Connelley, too, but that’s about it. All these other young whippersnappers didn’t get into the act until the 80s. I spose there ain’t many geezers like me left. (ptooey)
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