Alright had to go download MoM from GoG to get my nostalgia fix. But that Got me thinking about the REALLY old games I have played and loved as a kid.
So here is a short quiz to prove to yourselves if you are really an OLD gamer. Yes you could google these but that cheating lol
1. What was the name of the company that brought you the original games?
Zork, Trinity, and Wishbringer
2. What was the style of the games?
3. What was their cutting edge "Lewd" game called?
4. What game did they publish that coincides with a literay classic? (Well I think it should be a literary classic)
Bonus Question: In the lewd game how did you pick your gender?
Double Bonus Question: What happened if you didn't pick a gender fast enough?
Phew... I'm not old.
I don't know the answer to any of these.
I have been playing games since I was able to walk, but I'm only 24, I can't compete with you old timers.
lol yeah when I was looking at the dates I realized/remembered I was age 10-12 when I was playing these. God I can't beleive my mom let me play the Lewd one hehe.
Zork is old?!?!
Kids these days...
Damn Old Man (or woman) For a gamer I am old at 34 lol. and if you don't consider Zork old I won't even ask
So if Zork isn't an old game to you then you can anwser question 2 because I am talking about the original Zork.
My guesses would be
- Infocom
- Text adventure
- I think it was Leather Goddesses of Phobos (or Deimos)
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Don't know last 2, didn't play it
1 infocom ( have most of them bought at retail)
2 text adventures
3 leather godesses of phobos( bought at retail from tandy(radio shack to yanks))
4 hitchhikers guide to the galaxy("")
b1 enter the gender's toilet
b2 do not know but guess forced to female
harpo
Boulderdash.
I played Hamerabi (yes that's the correct spelling for the game, text fields could only hold 8 characters back then) on a DEC at my dad's work as a kid. This was before those fang-dangled things you connected to your TV's at home.
Does that make me old?
kill grue with nasty knife!
Here's a follow up question to separate the men from the boys:
What was the original name of the Infocom newsletter before a certain major publication threatened a lawsuit?
Ugh.....32 years old here, can't recall those to save my own ass atm. I keep thinking back to the Leisure Suit Larry games..the Old School ones of course. Also the old "Space-Ace" and "Space Quest" pop to mind. I played so many old games back in the day.
The Infocom games were purely Text based adventures. Think Choose You own adventure Books with alot more power. They were also Incrediably well written and very difficult at times. But it brings back memories of the days when games didn't have graphics to survive on. You wrote a good game with a good story or it sunk.
Two I never beat were Trinity and Leather Goddes of Phobos. But I was 12 then (Mabey younger) and didn't realize the clues that were hidden with the material that came with the game. I still find myself wishing I could find Trinity again because 20+ years later the fact I never beat that game still bugs me lol. How many games now a days will you be able to say that about in two decades.
Oh and as for the awnsers to the bonus and double bonus. Yes you chose a bathroom and that was your gender. And if you didn't get into a bathroom soon enough you had a bit of an embarrising accident and a very quick game over lol.
Though I find it funny and sad. After reading the wiki on this company and what happened after it was acquired by Activision. This scares me because I heard a rumor somewhere that Blizzard and Activision are doing a merger. If this is the case, and at this point I haven't looked into it yet. I am thinking that if you own Blizz stock after SC2 releases might be a great time to sell. Because if it is true I don't think a Blizzard Production will mean what it used to in a while.
Where have you been living; Blizzard and Activision have been merged for a while now.
wow need to check the internet connection in under my rock then.. because I actually didn't know that.
Only games I remember from that far back are Oregon trail and carmen sandiego. Also some weird maze game where you had to fire and arrow at the monster once you guess where it was in the maze. First 2 on the apple IIe and the other was on an atari cartridge based computer. Later was Kings Quest and Might and Magic.
Think I played Zork. There was Wumpus in there somewhere, other text mode games. All of which sucked. Except for Adventure which sucked less.
But I played, if only for a few minutes, SpaceWar on a DEC PDP something, in the Fall of 1965 at MIT. In those days the pocket calculator had not yet been invented and we all carried slide rules. I hoped that someday SpaceWar would grow up as computers became more powerful.
So when I play Sins I always think of SpaceWar.
And in a fantasy appear as a time traveler back in those elder days with a high end laptop. After showing them a couple of Sins videos and explaining how much computational power was sitting on the desk in front of their eyes, the savants would fold their hands, look at each other thoughtfully and then say (this being New England):
"This is not science! This is witchcraft! And you are a witch! Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live! Burn him at the stake boys!"
True story, I attended the meeting of the MIT Science Fiction Society in 1967 at which Isaac Asimov was put on trial as being not worthy of membership, he being a writer of fantasy and not science fiction. The charges were brought by a full Professor of Physics and a member of the Dean's Staff of the EE Department. The horrified Asimov asked just where he had written any fantasy and the specifics of the charge was this.
I think in The Caves of Steel a character was carrying an electronic device about the size of a brick that could do four function math, take square roots, and perform other wonders besides! He was assured that EE and Physics were in agreement that such a device was theoretically impossible. You just could not pack that much logic into a space that small. I don't remember anyone mentioning LSI. Asimov managed to argue his way out of it, of course. He being Asimov.
The technology and the games that run on it have come a long way since then. An incredibly long way.
That story is great. I wonder if Asimov ever called them up a fw dacades later just to say na na na na naaaaa
I suspect he rubbed it in good!
I kinda remember SpaceWar but never played it. And yeah, we used sliderules even in senior year HS AP math -- a 6' one hung over the chalkboard.
Remember fountain pens in grade school, before ball points? lol... Heck, even in grad school years later in '82 we used punch cards to run SAS programs.
Games keep us young
Ah, Nick Danger from The Firesign Theatre! Everyone loved that.
Sure remember the fountain pens, delightful devices whose main function was to shed their cap and permanently die a huge splotch on your shirt and your skin!
Punch cards, yeah. The card chips were very useful. Throw them in people's rooms, throw them everywhere. Wonderful. We used those for the hugely impressive looking IBM 7094 mainframe, 32K magnetic core storage, not bad for the day for the low low price of only $3 million.
Punch cards!
I remember at Uni lining up at the computer room to submit your box of punch cards and then waiting to be called for the results printouts. There was one guy who was a real smart ass so we grabbed a couple of his cards and put some extra punches in them. Let's just say he was very confused at the results.
Hey wilebill. That story of Asimov is great. When I was in 9th grade(I think) I had a class called IPS. Introductory to Physical Science. The text book was a fairly small(for text book)book by Asimov. It was there I learned that not only did he write great Science Fiction but that in fact he was a scientist as well(not sure how great there, but still). The book was mostly about teaching analytical skills combined with simple physics. Anyways, after that class I always had a bit more respect for him and his writings(which I already had read some of his work). I am not a huge science fiction fan(still like it).
I might of played Zork and can't recall that was the name. I did check wicki and from the description it sounds similiar to one of the first pc games I might have played. I started pc gaming in 1983 on a couple of friends early pc's. I remember a text game(think it was adventure), a ww2 naval strategy game(aircraft carriers like Akagi, etc. that you would have to time your attack or you could be without any planes to defend a counter-attack) and a game where there was a maze or labyrith as the dungeon where you would fight creatures and get treasure. When you went to the next level it was another maze. Repeat for 99 levels I think(never got that far up).
I don't remember there being any real graphics in those games but it was cool to see text moving or different colors on a screen then. One of the exciting things in a BASIC class then was to make a plane go by and drop out little parachute color text men. The code for that was like less than a page or maybe two pages(memory not that good).
Punch cards are really before my time for the most part. I know they were a pain in the..
Same here. Pretty sure the green version of Oregon Trail was the first game I encountered. I had a Zork book I think, but no game. Heh, I don't feel as old as I did when I woke up this morning. Thanks!
LOL no kidding these guys are making me feel like a damn kid.
just to make you all feel very young, I still have my b&W trs80 model 1 (bought 1980)AND the cassettes with sub-logic's flight simulator 1 and all the other games that I BOUGHT at retail for them, and the listings AND cassettes for the programs I WROTE for it.
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