Kids today grow up surrounded from birth by electronic entertainment of all sorts. They have a myriad of TV shows available on demand, on their schedule. They have vast libraries of music at their fingertips. With social networks and text messages, they can connect with their friends at all hours of the day.
And they have access to a backlog of thousands of great games on multiple platforms – from casual games on their iPads and phones to deep triple-A games with hundreds of hours of gameplay and production values rivaling Hollywood.
Game developers of advanced age remember a time before video games were in every household. We view this brave new world with a mixture of awe and jealousy.
Kids these days (I know, I know – my “old man” is now showing) have never known a world without great video games to play.
But unlike the next generation of game developers, I bet most of us old-timers have a perfect memory of the exact moment we became aware of the possibilities of interactive entertainment.
The Power of Typing Anything
When I was eleven, my stepfather brought home a terminal from his office.
My stepdad hadn’t been part of my family for long. My recently-divorced mom and I had just moved to Maryland; she was in the early stages of building a life with her new husband. Dropped into a crowded new middle school, I was a fish out of water that year – physically small and frequently picked on, it would be a year or so before I’d fall in with the good friends in the clique that would carry me through high school and into college.
My stepfather was (and still is) a genius – an electrical engineer, mathematician, and polyglot who worked as a civilian for the military. A science fiction fan and one of the most genuine and gentle people I’ve ever had the fortune to know, he was endlessly patient with his sometimes-troubled stepson. Though he never became a gamer, he shared his love of new technology with me.
So: the terminal. A clunky thing, more a typewriter than a computer. No display, just a roll of paper. It couldn’t do anything on its own – except connect to the government mainframe at my stepdad’s office with a primitive modem.
And on that mainframe, making the rounds among my stepdad’s co-workers, was a program called Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods.
I still remember sitting at the kitchen table while my stepdad hooked the terminal up. I remember the squawk of the modem sounds and the thrill as terminal printed on the roll of paper, ever so slowly, those first words…
“You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.”
I’d played video games before. I’d beg a few quarters now and then for pinball or Space Invaders when we’d pass by an arcade, and I’d battled my dad in Pong matches at a grandparent’s house.
But this was something new. This game didn’t seem to have set rules or boundaries. It just dropped me next to that brick building, and… waited for me to do something.
That moment was a true epiphany. I felt something that has stayed with me ever since.
I could type ANYTHING.
Reality Intrudes
Of course, I couldn’t ACTUALLY type anything.
Colossal Cave Adventure was the first of its kind, innovative but primitive by today’s standards. It had a basic two-word parser and a limited vocabulary. It had puzzles that could be nonsensical, requiring leaps of logic and pure guesswork. In the age before FAQs and online walkthroughs and forums, it was nearly impossible to solve.
But to an eleven-year-old boy, the text slowly printing on that roll of paper was nothing short of magic. There was an entire world to explore, with twisty passages and vaulted chambers and angry dwarves with axes and a fierce little songbird.
I don’t remember how far I got in that first session – probably not very far. My stepdad may have helped me solve the early puzzles.
What I do remember is that I kept that roll of paper from that first session for months afterwards, and I definitely remember begging my stepdad to bring the terminal home again.
Eventually I bumped up against the limitations of the game, frustrated by all the things I couldn’t type because Colossal Cave didn’t understand what I meant.
In the years that followed, I sought out increasingly sophisticated gaming experiences. There were Infocom text adventures like Zork and Planetfall and Enchanter that took the Colossal Cave experience and refined and improved it. There were sprawling RPGs on an Apple II, like Ultima 2 and Wizardry. There was the original Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner, the very first game I bought (it came in a little plastic baggie).
There were countless hours gaming on Atari consoles and computers at the houses of my friends. And there was a lot of pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons – not much actual playing, but endless afternoons crafting epic campaigns that would never get played.
All that time, the first Colossal Cave Adventure session stayed with me. In college I circled back to text adventures again, writing and releasing a series of retro shareware titles in the genre. They weren’t very sophisticated and I never made much money from them, but building them taught me a lot and helped me land my first job in the industry.
Colossal Cave: The Next Generation
Flash forward to summer 2019 and my family’s annual trip to visit my relatives.
It’s been a hot summer in New Hampshire this year and my stepdad’s house doesn’t have air conditioning, so it’s warm and muggy in the kitchen. My stepdad is retired now. He spends a lot of his time caring for my mom who’s confined to a nearby nursing home, but he still reads a lot of science fiction and tinkers on his Linux box (it’s best to not mention Microsoft or Windows around him).
Before our visit, he found the time to get Colossal Cave running on that Linux box and connected his Mac laptop to it. There’s no roll of paper, and the connection is instantaneous rather than sub-300 baud over a landline – but it’s the exact same game with all its flaws and virtues.
And now, on a warm New Hampshire afternoon, my stepdad is showing the game to my nine-year-old.
My son is a modern kiddo, navigating (with our help) all the good and bad that comes with growing up in today’s world. He’s a big Minecraft fan, and has a room full of Minecraft books and toys. He’s enrolled in a local Code Ninja and builds his own games on Scratch, a visual scripting language for kids. He’s dabbled in Fortnite at a friend’s house, though I don’t think he’s really a fan – it’s too competitive for him.
He also has multiple favorite YouTubers, and I’m pretty sure he likes watching them play games more than he likes playing games himself.
Nonetheless, when Grandpa John showed him Colossal Cave I saw my son have the same moment I’d had as a kid – that moment when his eyes widened and he turned around and asked us the question. “I can type ANYTHING?”
It won’t be as important a moment for him. His childhood gaming memories will revolve around Minecraft and YouTube, and his non-electronic hobbies – playing with his vast collection of plastic army men and mountains of Legos. He was frustrated by the puzzles in Colossal Cave and he quit shortly after we got to the part with the bird and the wicker cage (he’s a huge fan of snakes).
Like all nine-year-olds, what my son wants to do when he grows up changes on a daily basis. Some days he wants to direct movies, or design Lego sets, or write books, or paint pictures – but some days, he wants to make video games.
Still, I recognize that he won’t be influenced by Colossal Cave to the same degree I was, and I’m pretty sure he won’t write shareware text adventures as a side hustle in college.
But the feeling he has about the games he most loves is one I recognize.
It’s that feeling that all the best titles give us, be they old-school text adventures or Minecraft or a modern triple-A open world games. It’s the feeling the best developers strive to create for their fans, that memorable moment that will stick for years to come.
It’s the feeling that anything is possible.
What was your first experience? No, not that – get your mind out of the gutter! Your first GAMING experience – the one that was really special, that you remember even though it was years ago? Tell us your story in the comments!
My brother is 5 years older than I am and when we were little, I couldn’t have been much more than 4 or 5 myself, we had a very early PC and a Star Wars game. All I remember of it is the ASCII radar and the tips of the laser cannons in the HUD (all ASCII all the time). And I was the gunner! My brother, very sweet, had me sit on his lap and hit the spacebar when he’d say ‘fire.’ He was steering and choosing targets and doing the harder stuff, but I got to play, too. Similarly, when he played text adventures not long after, I served as his mapper and note taker. I wish I had any of those maps and notes. I have dim memories of a mongoose and sneakers. The first games I designed were expansions of those text adventures with D&D bolted on, pages and pages of weapons and armor drawings. I wish I had those, too, though surely they are more glorious in memory. An enjoyable read, David. Thanks for sharing!
Great story, Karen.
If I remember my text adventures right, the mongoose was from the Scott Adams (the game designer, not the Dilbert guy) adventure game Pirate Cove. It may (I’m speculating now) have been intended a tribute to the snake puzzle in Colossal Cave – and if so, it’s a really clever inversion, as it didn’t end well for the mongoose. 🙂