The Circle of IF
In 1979, I was a sophomore in high school and computers were things you saw on TV. I was the 2nd baseman of our varsity baseball team and it was raining after school, so coach paired us off and we played catch in the hallways with hard rubber baseballs. Jeff, a good friend and our shortstop with a gun for an arm kept trying to spin the ball off the floor and lockers to get it past me. I was doing the same to him. We both managed it pretty well until a ball corkscrewed passed me into a small room in the southeast corner of the 2nd floor hallway. This room was a storage room for the math department also used for tutoring. It also happened to be the location of the school's two paper terminals resided. These terminals were used to dial into the Milwaukee Public School's PDP 11/70.
I found the ball in this room and two students I knew from various classes and my social life, Gary and Chuck. Gary was on the LA32 playing a game called Dungeon and Chuck was playing a game called Adventure.
I've told this story many times when people ask me how I got into computers and I always say the same thing. Lightning struck me that day. I never returned to any high school sports and devoted 80% of my school time for the next 3 years on learning and working on computers. That sophomore year was really devoted to playing those two games. It wasn't easy because we were limited to 30 minute sign-up windows and the games only allowed for one save file (we hacked this later on by detaching a session to a background running process, then reattaching later). It took half a dozen students and nearly a year to complete both games.
My love for Zork continued when Infocom produced the Enchanter series, but I have always had a deep connection to mainframe Zork, aka DUNGEO.
Now that Sharpee is ready for the dog-fooding, it only took me a second to come up with a target to burn it into production shape.
I have started to build the prerequisites for a port of mainframe Zork to Sharpee.
This immediately added ADRs for:
- ADR-070: NPC System Architecture
- ADR-071: Daemons and Fuses (Timed Events)
- ADR-072: Combat System
Game development follows. Stay tuned!