Nostalgia...

[absolutebreeze_1]

Well whilst I am waiting for 2.5, I figured I’d waste some time talking about old times… and see if anyone else wants to talk about how they got into programming

My first foray into computers was when my grandparents bought me an Amstrad cpc 464 computer one christmas. That was back in around 1985. All my friends had commodore 64’s, acorn electrons or sinclair spectrums. For some reason - they weren’t really interested in programming.

The thing that got me into programming was the fact that the 464 came with a rather large manual that taught basic. Once I started working through that book I was totally hooked. Even simple things like drawing a circle on screen amazed me. I’d spend hours coding something and then just turn off without saving! I loved it.

Once I got to senior school(a few years later), I tried a bit of z80 assembler… although I did some sprite work and tutorials in magazines, the main reason I was interested in it was to write ‘pokes’ for games to get extra lives. I guess that was back when hacking games was an innocent past time. Even magazines of that day (Amstrad action, Zapp 64 etc) would fill several pages with pokes people had written.

Back in those days, people like the Oliver twins and the Darling brothers(Codemasters) were real role models - and I am glad to see that they are still working in the industry.

I ended up going through college, doing Pascal, VB, a bit of C and eventually ended up in my current job writing intranet php based finance software for an insurance company.

So thats the short story of what I have been doing this last 24 years (yikes, 24 years… I suddenly hit a moment of realisation and feel very old).

I noticed that we seem to have, erm… shall we say ‘mature’ guys and gals here using Unity and was wondering how they got into writing games.

Anyone fancy a trip down memory lane?

[simone007]

I’ve always been fascinated by videogames. My real love has always gone to strategy games (UFO-Enemy Unknown, Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, and many obscure wargames).

I love games that can be fun even for the programmer that created them (basically all of Sid Meier’s games).

My first computer was a IBM 8088 (4.77 mhz)!!
I tried some basic to make simple games (no graphics at all, only text).

After that, I learned programming at school and as a job. So I could develop a good programming knowledge, that is now very helpful for making games.

So my next try with games programming started reading the wornderful book from Andrè Lamothe… (“3d game programming”): a must read, very fun and instructive.
The technolgies used were DirectX7 and C++.
I tried only 2d games… but I was very satisfied with it: finally I got something moving on the screen!!!

The jump to 3d game programming came later (in 2004) with darkbasic professional. I didnt like it at all, mainly because DarkBasic is not an object oriented language.
But, again, it was a great satisfaction to make a 3d environment, even for a very simple game.

Now… there’s Unity, and its the start of another story

[taumel]

Hmmm, this could take some time, okay, here is a brief version head scratching. :O)

The first time i got in concact with video games were those tiny small handhelds with fixed graphics and only one game on it, still they were a lot of fun.

Then a very good friend of mine got a console with some sort of Galaga (very important not Galaxian, so the enemies could dissapear at the bottom and return!) on it, this had an awesome gameplay and graphics and we played it under the bed because the colours were much brigther this way. It also was built like a little Arcade with a tiny good steerable joystick on it.

Meanwhile we also encountered the Arcades. The problem here in germany was that the places were you can play them are for 18 years only and that one game costed 1 Deutsche Mark which was a lot more expensive than gaming in the USA. Sometimes you also could sneak into such a gaming hall, play for a short time before they threw you out, sometimes a single Arcade was placed outside for the younger audience or in a supermarket. Sometimes i went with friends who had a special lighter, if beeing used near the coin slot this gave you credits without paying.

The next big step was Atari’s VCS 2600, wow fantastic. Missile Command, Defender, Asteriods, Berzerk, Pitfall, … it also was the first time my parents slightly in touch with gaming and you swapped cartridges. Now it wasn’t a problem anymore what you wanted for a gift. :O)

Arcades were evolving a lot those days and the best always was in the summer vacations when we were going to Italy because there everyone could enter the gaming halls and it was way cheaper. Donkey Kong, Moon patrol, Tron, Jungle Hunt, DigDug, Xevious, Dragon’s Lair, … so many excellent games. Meanwhile they also placed some Arcades in the cinemas, or traditional toy shops had a gaming like area were they placed some consoles or Aracdes, a little bit shady how they robbed the children.

At school i had some tiny affairs with a Comodore PET.

Then one day my father wanted to buy a computer for doing some paperwork on it, you know calculating different household stuff. Guess what it didn’t take long and the computer was owned by me. Now games worked like this, you bought a magazine (Happy Computer) and each time you wanted to play a game you first had to enter the listing, took some time but at least you learned how to type in quickly. Then you played it, afterwards turned the computer off and next time you had to type in the listing again before playing. I still remember one of the best games was Wildwasser were you steered a boat in top down scrolling river and had to avoid rocks, i always wanted to do my own version of that but never found time to.

Then i got a Dataset and wow you could load and save stuff. Much better and it didn’t take long until we also used speed loaders due to the dataset’s original miserable speed. I also made my first basic game those days, a multiple choice adventure. Only shortly after that i got mayself a 1541 and then things became interesting. Over dark channels we got platine layouts and built our own SpeedDos, special functions in the C64 and the floppy was a lot lot faster. Fractals got renderd over the night (with opened computer due to avoiding maybe heat problems). You got the games via friends those days, not because you wanted to pirate, simply because there was almost no other way to get them. I still remember before i got Summer Games officially in a store it passed more than half a year. Anyway you got flooded with games and amongst them were some of the best games ever made. Did some small cracking for curious reasons but not for spreading.

But the best was yet to come, the Amiga! Ahhh, so far still the best computer time in my life. Man these were interesting times, as soon as the A1000 was released a couple of guys in our town tried to get some and i luckily was one of them. I threw every money i had together and begged my parents for the rest and after some weeks of waiting our couple of Amigas arrived, wow there it was, my A1000 with 512KB (256KB RAM extension included), the Amiga monitor, the keyboard which you could place under the computer, the mouse, marvellous, mindblowing, awesome, … all that on my desk.

Of course we also got some games and i still remember the joy when hearing the monks in The Bard’s Tale singing, the wonderful graphics of Marble Madness or the bass whilst playing Archon, the weird feeling of Mind Walker and and and… Whilst the C64 was primary a gaming computer, the Amiga was the first time i also seriously started programming on a computer. We got the hardware and software manuals, the SEKA Assembler and GFA Basic were our tools. Sometimes it’s still fun firing up an Amiga emulator and coding a bit with AsmOne, just for the joy. The Amiga was also the first computer which enabled art like stuff like painting with DeluxePaint or making music with a Tracker.

The Amiga community also was a very friendly one and i had lot’s of fun meeting friends on parties and exhibitions. Coding demo stuff, writing bootblock/-track nonsense. I wrote my first 3d stuff on the Amiga as well. I also had additional hardware like a digitizer, a 2MB RAM GolemBox which we got from a games company for coding purposes, used that for fast booting purposes as you could write a whole memory image into RAM and boot from that instead of the disk if something went wrong. Glory days!

Later on i bought an A4000/40 with, first time, a hadrdrive. What a cute little device (250 MB Maxtor, can’t remember exactly, all stored on a Syquest now :O), it enabled working with a computer a lot more reasonable as you didn’t had to boot from disks anymore. The Amiga 4000 was great as a system which you also could use for everyday purposes and productive work but it wasn’t as geeky as the A1000 was and AGA already sucked compared to OCS in the A1000 for it’s time. I remember talking to manufacturers about 3d functions on their third party gfx cards (you know Picasso and so on) but no interest, they were all just interested in 2d those days. Anyway i used this system for quite some time and there were tons of great stuff going on, some of those things are now reinvented in OSX.

Tiny affair with an Atari Falcon.

At university i used quite a couple of systems like Sun, AIX machines, SGI, Mac and so on.

Privatly i also had a nice affair with NeXT and for my diploma thesis i for the first time needed a PC, urks, at least it was linked to some SUNs and i also could play The Dig this way, the best known adventure game human minds have invented so far.

Then at work i had to use both PCs and Macs.

I guess the first PC system i bought for my own was an Athlon 500 PC with a Riva TNT2 (or was it 1?). And then time after time i’ve updated/replaced the PC, you know a Pentium machine, a GeForce, new Mobo and so on. Macs were nowhere those days and OSX wasn’t born yet. I also had a BeBox for some time and i liked it but it was clear that the system would end in Nirvana after they didn’t make the deal with Apple.

Console wise i bought a Lynx which was very cool. I really liked some of the games on it like Chip’s Challenge or Gates of Zendocon. I also programmed for the GBA. I didn’t buy one of the other consoles from Nintendo, Sony or Sega due to friends already owned them and well you only have a limited time for gaming.

Then right from the start i spotted Unity and a few months after i bought Unity i also bought a G4 Mini. I still like the machine and again did some assembler coding for fun on it, i just can’t stand Little Endian assembler. Since then i tried to buy a new Mac but they never released a machine i really wanted. Either it came with the typical Apple like bottlenecks like lame graphics, bad displays, … or it was way overpriced. Anyway the last Apple device i bought was the iPodTouch and for casual in bed gaming it’s great device also due to the multitouch.

Nowadays i’m mainly on my self built PC (always did that on my own) and also curious about Unity 2.5 for Windows.

I could write a whole lot more about all those days/years but i set myself a time limit for this, so that’s it. :O)

[jashan]

Wow, what an awesome thread …

I had started writing down my “game development history” in my Blog a little while ago … but never finished it. But here’s the first two entries:

The very first glimpses… around 1980 or so…

My very first “game programming experiences”

I really enjoyed reading taumel’s posting (haha, and now he’s the third certified “epic poster” ). And it seems like we share a bit of history: The very first time I remember getting in contact with “computer games” was actually with a friends pocket calculator which had a special “game mode”. I don’t remember how that game worked, but it was something with digits going left/right … and it was a lot of fun

We also had the Atari VCS 2600. I remember exactly when we got Missile Command. The sun was shining outside but we darkened the room and played like crazy. Haha, and there was Pac Man, too. What was Pitfall about? I think I’ve had that one, too - but don’t remember what it was all about.

Living in Germany with somewhat funny “protect our children” restrictions (those actually drove me into playing with some “kind-of-dark” things in my revolting teens), I think I only saw Arcades from the inside while travelling to other countries during vacations. That was rare fun!

When I was 10 years old, I got the Commodore C64 - this awesome machine. Hehe, yeah, and I remember typing those endless lists of numbers from computer magazines to get some new program. That was how I got my first sound tracker and started making music. Hehe, and I remember that I “employed” my mother to help with that. Actually, I think she did most of the hard work. Man, she was patient

What was the name of that Joystick-Killer? Olympic Games? Hehe, we did destroy a few joysticks in those “sports” competitions. I think the most important game for me on the C64 was Elite. That actually was the game that inspired my dreaming of creating large-scale open-ended multiplayer worlds. I still remember preaching to one of my school’s friends on a sunny early after-noon right after school about how cool it would be to have a virtual world where you could actually do space travel - and play with all your friends to team up against those bad-ass enemies in epic galactic wars.

Anyways, the sound tracker I had kind of pulled me away from playing games a bit and I started getting into creating music a lot more. The programming I had started with also kind of faded away. I still did play a few games, like Kaiser (very early “society simulation”) and a few others but mainly spent my time trying to create funky grooves. During the next couple of years I spent any money I could get on synthesizers, sequencers and home-recording equiment. I still had that dream of creating computer games … but I felt the time just wasn’t ripe, yet.

That was also the time when I got my first Amiga … and I think I had a couple of them (the 500, 1200 and … I still own my Amiga 4000 ). There, I had “KCS” - Keyboard Controlled Sequencer. And I had my very first experiences with 3D modelling, with Realsoft 3D - which was still called Real3D back then.

Hehe, I still have some of my “work” from back then online on my very first Website. I originally hosted that on AOL (which was my first “contact” with the Internet … I participated in one of their early field tests in Germany before they went online officially ). My biggest project back then was creating a music video to one of my songs … unfortunately, the technology was an incredible pain to use so I gave up after about one or two minutes of “material” (for an 8 or 9 minute song).

At that time - while my first experience was actually “re-programming” a basic computer game (pun intended) - I was completely away from programming and just enjoyed doing music and graphics stuff.

Also, I didn’t play that much … but of those games that I did play, Bard’s Tale definitely was one of the games most worth mentioning … I played all 3 of them and remember those hours and hours I spent mapping those dungeons out. Another pretty cool game was Ambermoon which I had played with a friend … every night until 8am in the morning, then went to sleep for half the day before we went back to play, yay

I think the first time I really got into 3D games was quite a bit later on the N64. And one of the most important games for me that I played definitely was “Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time”. I mentioned that before: That game touched me so deeply that I literally cried for half an hour when it was over (and poor Link had to go back into his childhood when it was obvious that he was about to have a really good time with that sweet princess … and then … all those different kinds of beings all partying together in Unity … after me not sleeping for about 36 or so hours or non-stop playing ).

I think it was playing Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time in combination with watching The Matrix (20+ times, in three different languages including Spanish which I barely understand ), which got me started with writing my first “design document” (well, no, to be honest: “loose collection of unrelated ideas” ). A movie can be a really powerful means of communication - but a game with its potential to have the player fully immersed is a completely different dimension.

It was more or less around that time when I also had my first attempt of “interactive 3D”. With … OMG: VRML. There’s also still some remains of that on my second Website - if you still find a decent VRML-player you might actually be able to have a look at these experiments. Interestingly, that got me in contact the first time with people interested in creating games professionally … but I was too busy with studying computer-science and making quick money with software-development to get into that at that time.

And … the time was simply not ripe.

Around that time, I had started studying computer-science and really learned the concepts. For one of the early courses we used Java as programming language - and it was really interesting for me to see how my visual and musical ambitions completely faded away (kind of painfully) and instead I got into “software-engineering creativity”. Java was the first programming language I felt was really worth getting into more deeply.

At some point in time I bought the Dreamcast. Soul Calibur rocked (those fighter-ladies were just tooo sweet ), but Shenmue was another real “milestone”. Wasn’t Shenmue the first game of which the budget was higher than that of contemporary Hollywood movies? … that kind of scared me … creating a game seemed to be totally out of reach for me.

I had looked a bit into screenwriting and creating movies but creating a feature-film seemed completely out of reach … and it wasn’t even interactive … but now that AAA-games were even more costly to create than movies it seemed the dream would just stay that: A child’s dream never to be fulfilled.

Then came EverQuest (for me, at least … I really wasn’t following the games market that closely). That was really something I had been waiting for: Finally real multiplayer! Wow! Hehe, I remember playing with my girl-friend back then, and she getting real angry at me because I - being the healer - let her die in some dungeon … and me getting jealous because she was talking to that high-level elf-something. Haha, and those famous corpse-runs (don’t ever die in a huge lake with pyranhas).

At the end, after dipping into a short episode of “game-addiction” (for a few weeks), I gave away all my in-game possessions and “left that world” (after a short session of running around and telling everybody that there’s some magical other world we could return to if we just decide to ).

After many many years of not doing anything musical, I started getting Cubase and some other tools (like, a pentatonic steeldrum, for instance ) … and one sunny after-noon “got back into making music” by writing a song I called “Coming Home”. That was a funny experience because I was used to composing with a sequencer, creating one track after the other, everything by a well-defined scheme. And now I had created a song just with my voice, memory (for the melody) and a sheet of paper

Hehe, I also got that one online on a site I created for the spinner dolphins of Hawaii which are a bit “overrun” by a somewhat careless kind of “pseudo-spiritual dolphin tourism”: Coming Home on Sleeping-Dolphins.org

Then my brother tried hooking me into World of Warcraft (he never really got into EveryQuest even though I tried my best ) … I didn’t install WoW for about six months after I had bought it. Too scary … then I played until about level 14 and jumped into Second Life and right after that “there.com” for a short moment (… of very long nights). But those aren’t games … those weren’t real fun (Second Life actually implemented many of the ideas I had written down in that loose “design document”: for instance connecting “real world money” with “game money” or user-created content … stuff that’s really hot today but that I totally lost interest in).

One thing I really like about WoW is how they have those quest-series that relate to old games (like Legend of Zelda). People can say about Blizzard whatever they want - but they do have humor. Haris Pilton, yeah!

Well, whenever I got into a game, I usually stopped after a short while because I got so overwhelmed with inspiration that I preferred developing ideas instead of spending my time playing. So I think it was in fact World of Warcraft that gave me that final “kick” to start actually developing my own game.

It was easy to see that developing a game engine would consume way too much time … so … I started looking for game-engines I could use. I played a little with XNA (because I really like the .NET framework) but since a lot of my friends own Macs I wanted to find something that would build for Mac, too.

So, I came across the Mono Website and there was a link to Unity.

Saw it, and thought “wow, this is very cool, I want to try the demo” … and realized: No, this is Mac only. Used the forum search (hint hint) and asked kindly what the best Mac would be.

The time was almost ripe

I immediately noticed that there was something special about the community around Unity. Everyone was really friendly and really enthusiastic. Felt like I had found something precious. Cool!

Back then, everyone was very excited about the upcoming Unity 2.0. And I was hoping that with Unity 2.0, there might be Mono/.NET 2.0, too … so I got ready to get my Mac Pro (I knew I needed a “proper” machine ) … and got a bit busy with work so I have to admit, I actually missed the original announcement of Unity 2.0 (but got my Mac Pro … so at least I had prepared myself for that magical moment).

Then, one very special day I checked back on unity3d.com … and saw that Unity 2.0 was out. I looked at the demos and found the tropical island demo … and …

I knew: NOW, the time was ripe!

Before getting Unity, I got Cheetah3d - and after some 10 years of not doing any “3d stuff” started creating the first model for my first game

As I knew that 32 years of waiting had finally come to an end and that my life would never be the same again once I started “playing” with Unity, I still waited until December before I actually bought my Pro license.

Now, it’s all together and after coming the full circle, everything makes a lot of sense. And as a secret for those who actually read such incredibly long postings: Since the Tropical Island demo was when I really knew “now, finally, after all those long years, the time is ripe”, I’ll be building it into “one of my games” as a very special tribute to Unity at a very special point of that game where you really wouldn’t expect a tropical island to appear

[Quietus2]

I came of age right around the time the first arcade machines started appearing in restaurants, as there was no such thing as a Video Arcade at the time. Pong, Defender, Space Invaders, Asteroids. They were casually interesting but the one that really hooked me was Pac Man!

Being a sci-fi kid (Hello Star Wars and Battlestar Galatica!) I was actually interested in computers slightly before that, begging my parents for a TRS-80. Not because of it’s stats, but because in my mind it was what a computer was supposed to look like.

The first computer I ever ‘touched’ was a Timex Sinclair 1000, typing in basic programs on the cheesy chicklet membrane keyboard. They were being sold at the time as a kit in the back of Popular Science magazine for $99!

Then one christmas I came downstairs and under the tree was the same computer that Captain Kirk was marketing on TV commercials. A Commodore Vic-20 with an amazing 4k of ram! In short order I was peeking and poking, bought myself a modem, 16k ram expansion unit and had taught myself 6502 assembly. I obviously had a knack for these computer things and my interest grew.

It was some fun times, typing in incredibly long lists of HEX code from Compute Magazine and hoping I could save the program to tape before the computer overheated and locked up. Logging into compuserve and playing Adventure.

Being that I was learning more about computers, I wanted an upgrade. So my parents then bought me an Apple //e. What a machine it was! 80 column card and 12k ram expansion, external floppy, Hayes 300bps micromodem, 16 channel sound card. My machine was pimped out! I was soon running my own BBS, got deeply involved in the blossoming Phreaker community. Was going to radio shack quite often to buy parts to build my own Blue and Red boxes.

Games were more fun back then, as each new game wasn’t a genre copy. Rather it was a genre definition! Wow Ultima ][ and III, they came on multiple 110k floppies. This game is going to be HUGE woot!

I also picked up a 4.77mhz PC clone around this time, but didn’t like it. It took ages to boot up because it needed to verify every byte of it’s 16k ram. It had monochrome graphics from it’s Hercules card, but you could buy another card that gave you a whopping 4 colors.

Then came the Mac 128. It was like a revolution in computers. I bought one with a very low serial number. I’ll never forget the first time I turned it on, the mac face smiled at me and I started moving the mouse about. It was a seminal event, like losing your virginity. It could immediately see this was the future of computing.

It was humorous at the time, the PC people claiming the Mac was a toy, that you don’t click on pictures to compute you type stuff! They got a little upset when Bill Gates started appearing in Mac Ads, pushing Microsoft products like Word and Excel. Little did they know.

Well I noticed I’m not even up to 1985 yet and the post is already getting lengthy. So I’ll go break breakfast. But it was fun thinking about the nostalgia.

[taumel]

@Jashan

→ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwfF5-Wt6YU (Pitfall)

And the true Joystick killers were either Decathlon, best played with Atari Joysticks with detached rubber hulls or tweaking the metal contacts in your Competition Pro (the earlier ones) or loosing in Archon and throwing your Joystick against the walls, never lost so far. :O)

→ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXWFu6qs5jM
→ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdfIfC9BHwQ&feature=related

[jashan]

Ah, yeah - Decathlon!!! And thanks for the Pitfall video, yeah, I remember playing that. Those EVIL crocodiles!!!

[absolutebreeze_1]

OMG - I remember pitfall… my neighbour had that on his atari (wedge shaped wooden looking console :lol: )

Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Hypersports, sound tracker (and lots of its variants)… wow you guys are bringing back things I had totally forgotten about.

I also liked Microprose Soccer and Kickstart.

Those were the days when graphics didn’t matter because gameplay ruled

And yes - I also typed in pages and pages of hex data statements too

I had an amiga for a couple of years too - and used to love those demos showing of raytraing, 3D soft poly and multicoloured sinusoidal text waving across the screen…

*Tony sighs deeply awww

[jcarpay]

For those interested reviving the Amiga era: Speedlink - hochwertiges, preiswertes PC-Zubehör für Gaming und Office.

[taumel]

Wow Sensible Soccer, we played this quite a lot. The best “multiplayergames” were those played at one computer with either two joysticks or two mice (please support this in Unity).

→ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL2T4Yn2Tq8

Now i have to think of Cannon Fodder as well. :O)

→ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJB_1e-MlyY

Once expressed some Amiga love in here:

→ http://spielwiese.marune.de/_uni/dezami/dezami.html

[RobbieDingo]

@""

A Commodore Vic-20 with an amazing 4k of ram!

10 Print “4K! you must have had that pimped, 3.5K was standard issue.”
20 goto 10

Dare I mention Elite on the BBC micro. Talk about a lost childhood until I bought the Docking System.

Great thread.

[Quietus2]

@""

@""

A Commodore Vic-20 with an amazing 4k of ram!

10 Print “4K! you must have had that pimped, 3.5K was standard issue.”
20 goto 10

iirc, you ended up with 3.43k on startup. But yeah I did have the 16k ram expansion cart. You actually needed it for some of the longer ‘big lists of hex numbers.’

When Captain Kirk was still young!

And so was Bill Gates!

[taumel]

Captain Kirk indeed looks cool.

@Quietus
Btw do you know that everytime i see a posting from you, something inside me forces me to look at your animation and wait till the creature rises and waves it’s arms, mysterious trigger. Who is that? I want to know more about my obsession.

[Quietus2]

@""

@Quietus
Btw do you know that everytime i see a posting from you, something inside me forces me to look at your animation and wait till the creature rises and waves it’s arms, mysterious trigger. Who is that? I want to know more about my obsession.

My favorite author is Lovecraft. My avatar is therefore a caricature of the mighty Cthulhu. If you’ve never read any of his short stories, you’re missing out on the greatest sci-fi/horror writer ever to have lived.

[taumel]

Ah okay, i’ve read a few things from him but it wasn’t exactly my style. Did you draw the animation on your own?

Btw a very good amateur SF-Horror-Radio-Play in german.

→ http://www.suspensiac.de/Hoerbuch

@Jashan
“JPEG-encoded IMAGES” ;O)

[polytropoi]

@""

Lovecraft…the greatest sci-fi/horror writer ever to have lived.

Yes.

[aaron_parr]

I appreciate all these stories on here. That video gaming and computer programming are so tightly intertwined for many of you is interesting. My main motivation (outside of making a living that is) for using computers has also been FUN. Unfortunately I have not let fun take me to the same heights as many of you. So while I have not produced anything of much value with Unity, I do enjoy playing with it when I have time, and decided to write up the story of how I got here as a hobbiest.

MY NOSTALGIA TRIP

The first video game I ever played was Pong, projected on a neighbor’s wall through something like a slide projector. This was '77-'78 in a working class neighborhood in the SF Bay Area. The smell of beer, pot, and funk music will forever be associated with Pong in my mind. I was 5.

Then in '81 (I believe it was 81 or early 82), my uncle, who was a Commodore dealer at the time, sold my dad a Vic20. My cousin was a Commodore kid, and since he was a few years older than me, I wanted to emulate him. We had several games: Cosmic Cruncher, Omega Race, Radar Rat Race, and Pirate’s Cove (a text adventure). The games were fun for awhile, but much too narrowly focused for my interest (unless I had friends over to play with me). So I learned BASIC. At first the whole family got together to type in the BASIC lessons from the manuals. One night my father had typed in a baseball game from a magazine or book, and after playing it turned the computer off. He was shocked to learn that all that code was immediately lost when he flipped the switch. After swearing profusely, he went out and bought a tape drive. That tape drive made a big difference in my motivation. After its purchase, I spent much of my time writing little games in BASIC and saving them to tape. My best friend would also come over and we would co-write text adventure games together. While one was writing the other would read Mad Magazines, and we’d switch back and forth. This later became a game in itself where we were not allowed to look at the other’s code to maintain the surprise when we played the game. Most of these were choose your own adventure style, or puzzle solving (using commodore’s weird ASCII graphics in patterns that the player had to make sense of for example).

A few year’s later, I inadvertantly killed the Vic. One of the joystick ports loosened over time and so the port would sometimes slip into the Vic’s body while someone tried to plug in a joystick. Eventually all the connectors between the port and the board snapped from fatigue. In our minds this was the perfect opportunity to use my best friend’s dad’s soldering gun (he was a Zenith TV repair man - back when TV’s were not all solid state electronics!). We used the gun to resolder all the joystick connectors back to the board. After we were done, and had closed up the Vic, I had mistakenly left a small piece of metal inside. The piece of metal eventually fried the board as it allowed various circuits to bridge in unexpected ways. A couple of Commodore geeks at a repair shop in San Pablo declared the Vic D.O.A…

Despite my negligence, I was soon given a C64 to replace the computer I destroyed. I continued my hobby of writing games in BASIC as before, but found it limiting and so spent more time playing games than writing them. I half heartedly tried to learn assembly from books, but had no teacher, or guidance and thus was quite discouraged by it, preferring to make games with Adventure Contruction Set or play the Ultima series. As a result of the hours I spent “unproductively” playing games, my parents took the computer and put it in storage. And that effectively ended this hobby for me for over a decade. I moved on to athletics, tinkering on engines, playing music, and later gaming - pen and paper RPGs, and board games both Euro style and US.

It was not until around 1997 that I wrote another line of code. A housemate had an Amiga which he occassionally loaded with BASIC to write a text adventure just for fun. One night he called me in to play a game he wrote. The moment I saw what he’d done, I realized how much I had missed writing games. I actually skipped out of my college classes for one week while creating in BASIC a single player, text based RPG, based on one of my housemate’s characters in our weekly D&D game. It was massive. Since this version of BASIC had a very limited buffer, I believe the limit was 25k of ASCII characters, I had to split up the code into pieces. I used roughly 2-3k for the “engine” and the remaining was swapped in and out of the buffer from text files I saved to the disk. Eventually I went back to class, but the experience changed me. I was excited by this experience with structuring little bits of code and trying to create a virtual reality on a computer.

The same week I went back to class, a friend dropped a new job in my lap, to maintain the Univerity’s Landscape Architecture Department website. I took the job because after years of working in agriculture, and plant breeding, I was out of a job. I needed money for rent, food, and tuition. So I learned HTML and photoshop, but spent much of my work time trying to figure out how to make a game with that stuff. I soon discovered JavaScript, and wrote two games using cookies to keep track of the game state. At the same time, I was indoctrinated into the Marathon and Mac culture of the computer lab I was working in, and started creating my own net levels for us to frag each other in. I believe some of these are still in a Marathon database of amateur maps somewhere, although my website through which I distributed them is long gone. This was in the days before Mac OS X. Admittedly the Mac sucked then but I knew no better, and the fanatics around me made sure that I became a Mac head.

Then in 98, the head of the lab who I had befriended bought Metrowerks Codewarrior for fun. I installed it on a Mac in a back room, and taught myself C. I planned to make a multiplayer RPG (top down view like Ultima V) playable over TCP/IP, and with a full fledged editor (like adventure construction set) to encourage community content and the interlinking of all these worlds people created. It was much too ambitious for me, and I could not get anybody to work with me on it. Also since I was coding on a university machine that had priority for graphic design students, I had to do most of my coding after hours. The result is that I only succeded in completing two projects. (1) Was a stripped down version of simple text for Mac OS 8, and (2) A tile based maze game that I ported from my Javascript experiments. After that I had to write my senior thesis (on wilderness areas, and bioregional planning), and never had time again to play with Codewarrior.

Incidentally, since I was also not allowed to write my Landscape thesis on the Design Lab computers, I needed a computer of my own. My friends at the lab and I found some discarded Mac II’s in a trash bin behind the engineering building that spring. We tested and gathered pieces from several of them, and assembled a working machine including monitor etc… It was a horribly outdated machine, but it was free, and served me for a number of years. I still have fond memories of it mostly because it had been liberated from the trash.

Until 2000, I left behind Landscape Architecture, and worked as a web developer in San Francisco. Although I learned more about code and computers during this time, I did not write a single game, and the only game I played was Riven, although I did tinker with LambdaMoo via telnet. In 2000, I retired from the Dot Com world and started working in construction for a design build landscape firm, because I idealistically wanted to learn some more down to earth skills. In retrospect, I sometimes wish I stayed in web dev. The dot com I had worked for is still going, and I’d be much more comfortable financially with them. But anyway…

In January of 2002 I finally picked up a good computer of my own (the same iMac that I use now to play with Unity), but I did little worthy of mention here until I discovered Unity in 2007. I became enamoured of the possibility of inserting 3D models of the landscape projects I had made in SketchUp and walking through them in real time. Although the environments I model have greatly improved in the past couple years, I still have yet to find the time around work and family to do much more. Its great however to have this tool, always sitting on my desktop ready to go when I have a moment. Hopefully one of my kids when they are old enough will be turned on by it, and we’ll work on something together.