You’ve Come a Long Way, Nerds: The First 16-bit Game?
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009I ran across this little history lesson on slashdot, so there’s my shout out to that site.
Depending on your age, you may or may not remember when the home computer was something that your nerdy cousin built in his parents garage or basement. My first computer was the TI something or other, and I remember writing code into that damn thing, trying to get a little man made of little cubes or “pixels” to dance. Well, long before my first foray into coding, a young man in Florida wrote a little game for his brother’s newly-built 16 bit home computer.
Scott Adams (not the guy who draws Dilbert) is something of a legend in video game history, as he started Adventure International, one of the first companies that published games for those early home computers. The games were far from sophisticated, but hey, what do you expect for the late 1970’s and early 1980’s?
Here’s a picture from that first game that Adams wrote, called Space War according to the red folder that holds the loose-leaf lined notebook pages in which the game’s code is written. Don’t laugh. A collector paid almost $200,000 for that folder.
Exciting, isn’t it?
Anyway, the game is based on Star Trek, of course. The E is the Enterprise and the C is a Klingon war ship. A C looks better than a K, according to something I read. The plus signs are photon torpedoes (fired from the wessel). The asterisks and the circles with horns or whatever are meteors and planets, respectively.
You can read about Adams, his brother Richard (who built the computer), and Adventure International on suspect wiki pages, if you really care about whether Adams wrote the first 16-bit game. There is always some debate over these kinds of things, and some people may take offense that I am calling Space War the first 16 bit game for the early 16 bit home computer. I don’t really care about that here, nor do I want to be involved in this debate. I am simply amazed at the game in the first place.
Sometimes by looking behind us, we gain new eyes to see the glory of the present.
Can you imagine playing this Space War game for hours, all jacked up on soda and Skittles, talking smack with to your Klingon opponent over Xbox Live?
16 bit, home computer, early computers, early video games, Adventure International, Star Trek, Scott Adams
