The Rise of Computer Games, Part II: Digitizing Nerddom

Great article! Love early CRPGs especially stuff like the original Wizardry!

So back when I was going to university, I had an old, dusty 486 DX 33 MHz.

Over the course of one semester, I put together a procedurally generated, wireframe 3D dungeon RPG game.

I basically had an open-door policy where other students could just stop on (assuming one of my roommates was around) and hop on the computer to play the game.

One of the things that made it stand out was that I included an editor that let anyone use the serial mouse and a little pixel graphic editor to create new monsters. You could assign stats to them such as HP, attack, defense, etc., and various other simple, typical Dungeons & Dragons traits. The game would calculate a challenge rating to determine their frequency within the world.

So one of the people in the dormitory, who was an artist, came in one day and laboriously recreated what looked exactly like a wall from the game itself. They then positioned it so that when it was placed automatically within the game, it would actually be physically indistinguishable from a normal dungeon wall.

So they’d be wandering the maze and then suddenly bump into this creature but since they set the attack damage to zero, it wouldn’t actually attack, which further deceived the player into thinking it was just an actual wall in the game.

And then they called the enemy a “dead end,” so that the game would say in the small text area, “you’ve encountered a dead end.”

The funny thing was that since the game spawns random monsters within the world, it would suddenly just appear like the dungeon was literally shifting around you and changing as you tried to map the maze. It drove a few of the more OCD players absolutely crazy before they figured it out.

Good memories from the 70s and 80s that only a gen X’r could really have: the awe and wonder of being a kid when the first microcomputers hit the stores.