So this is absolutely true:

When I was 14, I wrote the (as far as I can determine) first parser-driven BBS in the world, basically creating the first purpose-driven, "multi-player" online adventure game, with the following caveats:

- Unis had such games themselves, but their access was limited to other university students and not the general public.

- It's also possible that someone else might have done the same thing before me, but I have never found any record of a such a BBS or online game existing prior to 1981.

The name of the BBS was 'New House of Wrath' and it featured a house that you explored via simple verb-noun syntax. Each room in the house was a BBS function (various text games which I wrote myself / a message base / a philez repository / a graffiti wall) as well as a simple underlying adventure in the style of Zork. The whole thing was written in sloppy TRS-DOS BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III and resided within 48k of memory including a primitive DB engine that I wrote. I still have a 8-pin dot-maxtrix print out of the code.

Shortly after my BBS went "online", a couple of multi-line BBSs sprung up, but these were straight BBSs without an overlying structure like mine.

At the time, I thought nothing of writing the BBS other than it was a fun thing to do. 80 Micro, the magazine that covered all things TRS-related, was going to write a story about my BBS, but nothing ever came of it. I ran it until about 1986 when I finally gave up because everyone was going to online service like Compu$erve and Prodigy.

I know I'll never get a single bit of credit for what I did, but I know what I did and I'm proud of my little contribution to the online world; that'll have to be enough.

So, it's Zork, then?

"I started "coding" at 8 by typing out programs from an adventure game programming book, in BASIC (think old Infocom games, like Wishbringer/Zork, etc). "

Me too! I remember typing out pages and pages of BASIC on my C64 from a magazine... ugh. Then I made my own adventure game (ripping off Aliens) with a whole bunch of gotos for each "room".... the horror!

"The challenge in today's programming environment is the rapid pace of change. It's so f'n hard to keep up with every new toolkit, platform, library, programming language enhancements, etc."

Pfsh... how hard can it possibly be?

This is so true...

Programming without the internet was tough. I remember my early years of programming in ASM and C/C++. The only internet access was via BBSes and Trumpet Winsock. Your only source of real help was from Usenet groups and questionable help files. There was no such thing as Intelli-sense (as we know it now) or auto-complete; you pretty much had to memorize the parameters for all Win32 API calls and the STL for C++ was brutal to use. Programming nowadays is relatively easy in comparison - pretty much anyone can code thanks to the internet and fantastic online resources. Heck, my 7 yr old daughter is learning to write code using a Scratch-derived visual programming language and Cosmo (look it up, it's awesome). I started "coding" at 8 by typing out programs from an adventure game programming book, in BASIC (think old Infocom games, like Wishbringer/Zork, etc).

The challenge in today's programming environment is the rapid pace of change. It's so f'n hard to keep up with every new toolkit, platform, library, programming language enhancements, etc.

So how am I a different type of gamer? I've been gaming since the 80s, back when things like Zork were just a black screen with white text, and you got a white plastic rock in the box with the game (edit - actually, I think that was Wishbringer with the plastic rock...).

Full Throttle was a great game for its day but it really was quite short. Play through it again and you'll remember what I'm talking about. Even for its time, it was short. Most gamers these days will find this easily forgettable was my point.

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Would be neat if there was some way for them to give actual directions through keyboard - like the arrow keys would signal the character somehow.

as it is, reminds me more of a Zork style game.

Oh man. you're putting me on the spot with that question. I traded 1/2 ownership of a 128mac for my brother's old apple 2 and a shoe box of floppy's. I didn't go through 1/2 of them before I got kicked out of the house and he took it all back. I remember a few text games...hitchhikers guide among them. I think also defender, Montezuma's revenge sounds familiar, Wolfenstien, Beyond Wolfenstien, Cannonball Blitz, Centipede, choplifter, crystal castles, frogger, galaxian, joust, kung fu master, leisure suit larry in the land of the lounge lizards, lode runner, missile defense, moon patrol, qix, tapper, ultima (maybe ultima 2), and zork. That's all I recognize from the list.

I've been watching these (they're up to episode 4 as I write), and they are such a trip down memory lane for me, they traverse my gaming life very well. I loved Kings Quest when it came out, I played some Zork (not much though), and devoured the Space Quests, Police Quests, Leisure suit Larry... and then the Monkey Island games. LOVED them.

I love these retrospectives.

And I love being a backer of DoubleFine's Adventure game, cannot WAIT for that to arrive

Hell a tech brained kid in the 90s might have known about Apple, but they were on their way out of near everything. I can recall using them in middle school, around when I was in maybe 6th or 7th grade and even then they were trying to get rid of them when budgeting allowed.

Amiga was the one everyone used to talk about because video games and graphics were the new things coming along for games. Prior to Doom you had Archon, Oregon Trail, Zork, and other text based stuff....that was early and mid 90s. Think I got my first computer around 95, Doom came out in 93. But when stuff came out back then it didn't spread as quickly as it does now since people owning computers was rare and if they did it was 50/50 if they could do much of anything when it came to games.

Never physically encountered an Amiga, but that was the stuff all the "big studios" were using for their video production and what not if you heard about them at all.

Apples were novel, just because having one meant you had a computer. And computers were pretty rare. Consoles were where it was for actually "good" games for a long time, PCs were ungodly expensive.

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I've been talking to some of my Chinese colleagues and they tell me that there are VAST amounts of traffic to MegaUpload type sites throughout Asia that are dark to the Western world because of the language barrier.

This problem isn't going to go away. The copying cat is out of the bag, but there is a big upside that a lot of people don't acknowledge:

Millions more eyeballs are watching movies than would have is they weren't shared. The trick is harnessing this in a "free" setting. In the short term, we're probably talking about embedding things into the movies that are hard to strip - like product placements - as annoying as they are.

In the long term there may be other creative solutions. I was listening to this very nerdy podcast about the old Infocom text adventure games like Zork - and they mentioned their use of "feelies" as a form of copy protection. Perhaps, as movies become more interactive - this will be an option.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by my15minutes.

my god, I'm old enough to have played (and partially mapped) Zork

Come on, it's Zork, on a typewriter... *promote

I remember playing "return to zork" on a mac computer... same time I seen the Hindenburg crash on the encyclopedia cd... oh to be in grade seven again....

I'm one of the few who actually beat Bionic Commando on the NES. You know, the game that was intensely impossible to get through on certain levels? The one with no save feature? The one that took nearly six hours to play through? Yeah, that one.

But at that time, games like The Legend of Zelda, Mike Tyson's Punch Out, and Contra, were the fun games. Before that time, for computer games, was ones like Empire, Wing Commander, Space Quest, and even Zork. And before those games: Pong. While the graphics of games have improved tremdously, the game play has remained a constant.

Castlevania 2, Rescue the Embassy, Russian Attack, Jackal, JAWS, and others, were enjoyable games for their day. COD, WoW, EQ, and others, that are popular now, will soon be retired in favoror of newer, more graphic intensive games in 5-10 years.