JENNIFER: You’re really into computers, hunh? What are you doing?
DAVID: I’m dialing into the school’s computer. They change their password every couple of weeks, but I know where they write it down.
JENNIFER: [Seeing what David’s doing on his computer] Are those your grades?
DAVID: Yup. I don’t think I deserved an F, do you? [David changes his grade from an F to a C.]
JENNIFER: You can’t do that!
DAVID: Already done. Do you have a middle initial?
JENNIFER: K, for Katherine. [Jennifer reacting as David pulls up her file on the computer] Those are my grades!
DAVID: How can anybody get a D in Home Ec?
JENNIFER: That’s none of your business. Can you erase this please?
DAVID: No, too late.
JENNIFER: What are you doing?
DAVID: I’m changing your Biology grade.
JENNIFER: No! I don’t want you to do that. You’ll get me into trouble!
DAVID: No, nobody can find out. [David changes her Biology grade from an F to a C] There! You got a C! Now you won’t have to go to summer school.

— From the 1983 movie Wargames

Thus far in this blog series about my journey from gamer to game developer, I’ve mostly focused on all the soft, conceptual stuff; all the games, the books, and the media that shaped my philosophies about what games were and how narrative settings should be created. To a lesser degree I’ve also shared with you the stories about how I was first inculcated to the worlds of arcade games and portable electronics during my early teens in the late 1970s. Mostly what I’ve told you has been from the consumer — i.e. the gamer — side of this equation. Now the time has come to start crossing over and start talking about the more technical skills I had to acquire so that I’d later be ready to mesh the abstract worlds of stories and game mechanics with the more pragmatic capabilities of computers and software. I’ll forgive you if you think that what I’m about to share sounds like I’m roaming far, far off into the weeds, but trust me when I say, eventually all of this is important if you want to understand how I got to where I am. All of these pieces eventually tie together.

In junior high, whenever I began to seriously consider what career I’d eventually want to pursue — and thus when I began making decisions about what classes I’d need to get to my eventual career — computer game designer wasn’t on the drawing board. I had no conception of how they were created — or at least no accurate conception, and thus no idea of what I needed to know. On Star Trek, whenever the crew of the Enterprise needed the computer to do something, they just talked to it and it would do whatever it was asked to do, or produce whatever data it was asked to produce. We never saw a line of computer code on screen, so I had no idea what computer programming was, or what a computer language was. It could have been black magic for all I knew (and you won’t entirely dissuade me from that idea, even after my having learned a few forms of coding over the past thirty-six years.)

Of course, while I was completely ignorant of the programming side of things, I wasn’t so entirely thick that I didn’t at least understand that electronics were somehow involved. I’d come from a family that was absolutely rife with tinkerers and shade tree mechanics. My Uncle J.L. Hallford had been a radio operator in World War II, and had brought that interest back from the European theater of war into his living room in Stilwell, Oklahoma. He was the absolute living definition of early adopter. My first demonstrations of virtually every consumer gadget produced between 1966 and the early 1990s usually took place in his home (sometimes months before I even saw them on store shelves), up to and including my first experience playing Pong on an Atari 2600.

My father’s interests mostly lay more along the lines of the mechanical than the electronic — a practical bent that came from having grown up on a hardscrabble farm during the Great Depression in Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma. When things broke down, my grandparents didn’t have enough money that they could call in plumbers, or mechanics, or carpenters, or electricians to fix whatever had broken down. Their only recourse came from doing things themselves, and so my father and his siblings (as well as my mother’s too) learned how to do everything themselves because the cavalry wasn’t coming. Understanding how everything around them worked was essential to survival in a world that seemed absolutely hellbent on erasing them from existence on a day-to-day basis. These are traits that got passed down to my parents and to my aunts and uncles as well. In turn, my father passed on this “jack of all trades” philosophy of living to my brother and I, though we would adapt this idea for the very different world in which we were raised.

Sometime in the mid 1970s I’m in my living room. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, so I should be outside and pretending to storm the beaches of Normandy with my friend David, but instead I’m inside and seated on the floor with a large mirror braced between my knees. I’m doing my best to keep it directed at the screen of our 25” wood paneled Zenith color television console. It’s the size and weight of a large boat anchor, and as a TV about as useful right now because the Bonanza rerun onscreen is all out of whack. Lorne Greene has turned blue, and there are jagged bars through his face.

Behind the TV, my father hums a tune by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys while he meticulously removes the TV’s protective rear radiation shield stamped with the gigantic warning: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES OPERATE TELEVISION WHILE BACK PANEL IS OPEN! DO NOT SIT OR STAND BEHIND THE TELEVISION WHILE THE TELEVISION IS ON! My father ignores these warnings and chucks the panel aside. Clearly these words weren’t meant for him, but only for mere mortals.

With the back panel off, he’s got access to the guts of the TV and he’s begun tweaking different controls and studying the results in the screen’s reflection. The image shifts and warps. Cycles through varying shades of green, red, and blue. Occasionally he shoots a question to my older brother Gene who is seated on the concrete lip of our fireplace. Gene reviews the circuit diagram printed in the back of the TV’s antiquated manual, then shoots back a reply laced with techno babble about resistors, capacitors, ohms, voltage. I’m still too young to understand what any of it means, but this is a language in which my father is somewhat conversant, and in which my brother will soon be quite fluent. After a bit more conversation, they both come to the conclusion that in that forest of humming electronic components inside, there’s probably a failing vacuum tube that needs to be replaced. Within moments the offending part is yanked, and the three of us pile into the family station wagon to head down to our local hardware store where we can test the tube ourselves in a machine designed exactly for that purpose.

This is something which most folks under forty don’t quite grasp today. Before the nineties, most electronics and appliance manufacturers assumed that at least a significant portion of ordinary people wanted to be able to repair things on their own. If something was broken, you could head down to your local hardware store — or your local Radio Shack store — and pick up whatever parts or tools you needed. The manual for most devices didn’t just contain operational instructions, they had printed schematics for everything inside the box, and sometimes even detailed repair instructions. The information was there, if you cared to look for it.

Given that my parents rarely purchased anything new, my dad and my brother were almost always busy fixing something: TVs, cars, radios, clocks, water heaters, the septic tank — it was honestly no surprise that my father ended up supervising all the vocational programs of our local high school given that he could easily have been the teacher in any of the departments he oversaw (with the probable exceptions of journalism and cosmetology). My brother Gene, however, gravitated most strongly to anything with a circuit board, so between sessions of helping my dad and spending vacations with my Uncle J.L., he decided in high school to specialize in electronics. He studied for and received broadcast licenses for CB radio, and later HAM and shortwave radios. We erected a Moonraker antennae that soared twenty feet above our roofline, requiring support from guywires attached to three of our gigantic hickory trees. At night I could hear Gene in his room, the beep of morse code flying back and forth as he exchanged messages with people all over the globe. Twenty years before the Internet, he was already connected to a truly free web of communication with anyone who was similarly equipped.

Gene carried his interest in electronics to Tulsa Junior College, but once there he began to grapple with the reality of a minor disability which unfortunately would render any future career in electronics engineering incredibly difficult, if not entirely impossible. He was born with classical color blindness, virtually unable to tell a green wire from a red one. In the macro world he’d been able to compensate, taking cues from the environment that helped him deal with situations where being able to differentiate between different colors was important. But down at a micro level on a circuit board — which might be crammed with any number of different colored wires — he was presented with a situation where he could make terrible, potentially even deadly, mistakes. He would be forced to change his major field of study, and his decision would have an impact not only on his future career, but also on my own.

At Oklahoma State University, he immersed himself in classes that did not particularly thrill my father. The same person who’d got himself kicked off the bookmobile in junior high for checking out books about UFOs and Bigfoot enrolled in courses about medieval history and philosophy — some of which he brought home and “assigned” to eighth-grade me as homework. But despite his selection of these somewhat offbeat electives, he’d chosen to pursue psychology, and interestingly enough, he’d arrived on campus just at a time when his new major, his hobbies, and his skills in electronics would come together in a brilliant bit of synchronicity.

During the 1960s and the 1970s, the fields of neuroscience and computer science were converging in a mad rush to answer one of the oldest questions in the book: what is the nature of human consciousness? Many neuroscientists wondered if the mind was a machine in the same way that the human body was. Were thoughts, memories, and perceptions things that could be reduced to quantifiable phenomena? Could human behavior be following some kind of human programming language that could predict how people acted? From the other side of the argument, computer scientists were exploring the structure of the human brain and wondering if they engineered computers to model synapses and create more sophisticated languages, they might ultimately find a way to create synthetic consciousnesses that could equal — or supersede — the capabilities of the human mind. Thus, the groundwork was laid for the development of neural networks, large language models and artificial intelligence.

One of the first products of this grand synthesis of studies was a program named Eliza, developed between 1964 and 1967 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. The purpose of the program was to simulate a Rogerian psychotherapist. It would prompt a user to answer questions that it posed, and then behave as though it understood the responses given to it. Its purpose was not actual psychoanalysis — the power of the computers and the complexity of ELIZA’s algorithms at that time were nowhere near sophisticated enough to achieve that feat — but instead to study the nature of human communication, and see how users emotionally responded to the program. Startlingly enough, an incredibly high percentage of users believed that ELIZA truly was responding to them and understanding what it was being told.

By the time that my brother stepped onto campus at OSU, there were several imitators of the ELIZA project floating around on different campuses. On at least a few occasions he got the opportunity to doodle around with one, and his curiosity was piqued with the possibilities, but a truly intensive study would require more time with a computer than he could get from casual trips to the university’s lab. If he was going to get anywhere, he’d need to invest in a computer for himself.

POCKET POWER - The TRS-80 “pocket computer” (aka the PC-1) was first introduced in 1980 and retailed at $169 — roughly equivalent to about $800 in 2026 dollars. It was powered by two 4-bit processors, had 1.9 kBs of RAM, 11 kBx of ROM, operated at 256 kHz, and was programmable in BASIC. It was marketed at people who already had full size TRS-80s in their homes or offices, but wanted mobile computing power. Given its price point and limited capabilities, it better served novice users who were looking for an accessible on ramp into the world of computing.

The first time Gene brought home his TRS-80 “pocket computer,” I thought it was just another calculator. It was only slightly larger than my hand, and was protected in a nice black leatherette slip case. I couldn’t grasp how it could be the same kind of device as the bulky TRS-80s I’d seen lined up in the windows at Radio Shack, but Gene assured me that this thing was, in fact, a microcomputer, and while small, still capable of doing quite a lot.

The 122-page manual that accompanied his new toy advised me that this computer “spoke” BASIC, and that the user was assumed to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of this programming language. To me, BASIC might as well have been ancient Babylonian or Martian as I’d never even heard of it before finding it named in the manual, and Gene was the only “speaker” that I knew of. After studying the booklet for a bit, I was at least thankful to discover that I was already familiar with critical mathematical ideas like variables because I was, at the same time, slogging my way through ninth grade algebra. But there were also a whole slew of arcane new words I had to familiarize myself with like GOTO, GOSUB, DEBUG, AREAD, and REM, and I needed to figure out what the hell a FOR NEXT loop was and why I’d want to use one.

Although there were programming examples available in the back of the book, the most helpful thing I had to go by was the conversational program that Gene had been experimenting with that was parked in the device’s memory. The format was simple. The program would ask the user their name, greet the user by the name the user provided, and then proceeded through a very linear series of questions and answers that I assume was inspired by whatever ELIZA clone Gene had worked with at OSU. With his permission, I made a few tweaks of my own to his program and began to write prompts and responses to different kinds of input from the user. I had, unwittingly, taken my first step into the world of writing interactive dialog and branching narrative, and I had an over-powered calculator to thank for it.

With time, patience, and a lot of help from the computer magazines of the era, I learned how to develop more sophisticated programs. Graphically the PC-1 (as it would later be called) was extremely limited, so aside from spinning the cursor, or animating text to move up, down, or across the display, I wasn’t going to be building the next Missile Command. But I was able to create a few text-based trivia puzzlers and variations on the classic game Hangman. Along with learning how to program in BASIC, I was also beginning to create games on my own.

Of course, with all this newfound great power also came great irresponsibility. While visiting electronics stores and department stores of that era, I discovered that I already knew more about computers than the people who were selling them. If I caught a store clerk who was busy dealing with other customers, I’d often switch their floor models into programming mode, hammer out a few dozen lines, and create customized versions of Gene’s original conversational program that would ask users for their name (or other bits of information), and then give them somewhat less than complimentary responses. To add to the fun, I made it impossible to break out of my routines short of forcing the machines to be manually rebooted. Had I ever been caught, I’m sure that I would have been banned from every Sears in Oklahoma.

Even into my senior year in high school, I was still using my superior command of BASIC to pull pranks on my unwitting teachers and fellow classmates. Our computer math lab at Charles Page High School was furnished entirely with standard sized TRS-80s. Lacking hard drives (which were still a high-ticket luxury item that was out of reach of most consumers), every machine there needed to boot up the operating system from a 5.25” floppy disk. Every student had their own boot disk — on which they also stored all their data for assignments — and they would retrieve them from an organizer kept on the teacher’s desk at the start of each day’s class. In this low-security situation, it was incredibly easy for me one day to “accidentally” borrow the start-up disks of a few of my fellow classmates and modify them with a new, special startup routine that started with the following message:

“ALL FILES ON THIS DISK ARE ABOUT TO BE DELETED. PLEASE STAND BY.”

The computer ran through a countdown. Then, at the end:

“jUST KIDDING! HAVE A NICE DAY!”

Of course, it didn’t take a genius for anyone in the class to figure out who had been behind this chicanery. Thankfully my targets took it all in good humor, and even the teacher had an appreciative laugh at my prank. I wasn’t exactly Ferris Bueller, but I was learning how to have fun with computers.

THIS IS HOW I ROLL - After discovering how to generate random numbers on the PC-1, I naturally decided to create a dice-rolling program in BASIC, and had ambitions of developing a full-fledged character generator for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but that project ended up being too ungainly to use on the TRS-80 pocket computer, and had to wait until I had my next computer.

#TRS80 #RadioShack #GameDev #ComputerHistory #Programming #Bueller

PROLOGUE

Today, when most people think of terrorism in America, their first thought is inevitably of the destruction of the twin towers. They think of the billowing smoke cloud, and the blackened girders, and the nearly non-stop coverage of Ground Zero. No one even needs mention a date because those three numbers have been incised so indelibly upon our collective consciousness. For me, however, 9/11 was only the culminating third chapter in a terrorism story that had begun six years earlier. 1995 was the year that the terrorists came for me, and those I love.

• • •

Read more

Read more

Read more

Hello Edgians!

I hope you all had a happy holiday, and that you’re all safe and well as we move into what has already proven to be a challenging New Year. I’ll have a few exciting announcements soon a…

Read more

Read more

Read more

#Author #GameDesigner #Historian #BookSky #BookTok #Bookstagram #GameDev #History #Strategy #RPG #Ubisoft #NewWorldComputing #DarkHorse #MiniDoc #DeepDive

Howdy folks. I know I haven’t posted any major updates on my reimaging of Planet’s Edge for a bit, but just wanted you to know that I’ve been back at work on it the past couple of weeks, trying to ge…

Read more

-- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

Today, if you drive down 15th street in Tulsa between Peoria and Utica, you’ll find a stretch of trendy pubs, coffee houses, clubs, and galleries (along with a handful of Tulsa’s oldest churches.) Revitalized in the mid 1980s and re-christened Cherry Street after its original, pre-1907 name, the Cherry Street District is a hot spot for young folks to find food, fun, and largely harmless entertainment. If you were to wind the clock back to the pre-disco era however, you would discover a neighborhood that was quite different.

In the 1970s, 15th Street was considered quite unsavory by mainstream Tulsa’s standards. Most of the businesses along it were operating out of run-down storefronts, and the low rents in the community typically attracted more drunks, drug addicts, and vagrants than it did shoppers for its string of beauty shops and junk stores. Unattractive as it could seem to more traditional, middle-class folks however, it also became a haven for Oklahoma’s outcast hippies, heretics, hookers, queers, commies, witches and other miscellaneous counterculture warriors. Predominantly the talk on the street there was not about commerce but about altered states of consciousness, spiritual awakenings, and new social orders.

Founded in 1975, Peace of Mind Books became a gathering place for all those searching souls on 15th Street. Stepping into the front door, visitors would be met with a mélange of competing smells: old books, sandalwood smoke, patolli oil, and the unmistakable reek of Muskogee weed that couldn’t be concealed, regardless of what they put in their incense burners (I hate to break it to you folks, but Merle Haggard had no idea what they were smoking down there.) Crystals hung in all the storefront windows, splashing rainbow-colored light across the spines of countless books covering everything from Carlos Casteneda’s musings on anthropology, tomes of Celtic history, Foxfire books about getting back to nature, beat poetry, gay fiction, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s angel books, and that burgeoning category that was increasingly becoming associated with Peace of Mind, the occult.

Now as we’ve already discussed in this series (and elsewhere in this blog), during the early and mid 70s, I wasn’t quite ready for what Peace of Mind had to offer. I was still very much a church kid. Until my brother Gene suggested one day that I come with him to check the place out, I’d never even thought of stepping across the threshold of such a heathenish establishment. Even if it wasn’t for the heretical books that were darkly rumored to be on the bookshelves, they also had a massage parlor attached to the bookstore, and I knew about those places. Well, at least I’d heard about them on the TV news. The last thing I wanted was to do was get arrested for going to a bookstore. But finally, after a little convincing that I wasn’t going to get in trouble, he talked me into it, just like he did everything else.

As we walked in from the parking lot, I was filled with dread that I’d find Anton LaVey sitting behind the counter eating a baby, but the shop was not at all what I’d expected it to be. It was as I described above, a cozy little bookshop that admittedly smelled a little funny, but I was too young at the time to recognize “that smell.” As for our clerk, it wasn’t Anton, but a rather sweet, mousey-looking twenty something year old girl who was thumbing through a book about horoscopes. She asked me my star sign, because that was also a thing about the supernatural 70s. Everybody knew their star signs and talked about them vociferously, even if they didn’t believe in them.

What I’d come looking for, despite my early reservations about the store, was a book about the watchers (aka Nephilim) who were mentioned in Genesis 6:4 of my King James Bible. “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came among the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” I had of late become obsessed with this little bit of biblical lore. I had many questions. Sons of God? Plural? Were these angels, or something else? And giants created by angels having sex with humans? The more I’d begun to dig, and to ask questions from my bemused youth pastor at church, I found only more questions which my protestant friends couldn’t comfortably answer. When they didn’t want to discuss the conflict between the idea of a perfect and unchangeable heaven and the idea of a war in heaven (which is discussed in greater detail in the Catholic bible, and even more in the gnostic gospels), I started to look for answers on my own. I was getting kicked out of churches all across my hometown because asking questions was not welcome. But here, in this quiet little store on 15th street, I found other people like me who were just trying to make sense of the stories they’d been told growing up, make sense of the world that in the 1970s seemed to be positively aboil with paranormal activity.

DO YOU WANT A HAPPY ENDING? Just what every teenager wants. A spiritual bookstore on the corner, and a massage parlor just up the stairs. I guess everyone has to find their own way to spiritual relief.

I think my trouble probably began with Johnny Carson. Many years before I ever set foot in Peace of Mind Books — long before Jimmy Fallon or Jay Leno began warming the throne vacated by the once great king of late-night television — Carson wielded the kind of cultural relevance that teenage Tiktokers only dream of ever having. The thing about most people having only three channels of television to choose from is that even the lowest rated program of that era would be a run-away ratings hit for any show on any linear network or streaming channel today. Positively every American who had a TV set watched Johnny at least a few times a week, and whether he was interviewing Robin Williams for the dozenth time, or poking fun at Ed Macmahon, or cracking himself up doing his corny Carnac the Magnificent mind-reader routine, Carson focused the national attention on whatever he was interested in at the time. Virtually everyone he anointed with an appearance became an overnight celebrity regardless of what their statuses had been the night before they sat on his star-making couch.

I don’t know for certain what Johnny’s true thoughts were on the subjects of things like the paranormal, but it was through his show that I first heard adult people at least semi-seriously discussing topics like extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, faith healing and spontaneous combustion. The mind reading mentalist Kreskin made a stunning eighty-eight appearances on The Tonight Show over the years, while notable paranormal skeptic The Amazing Randi — who for many years offered a million-dollar reward for incontrovertible, scientific proof of psychic phenomena — made an astonishing thirty appearances on Carson himself. Admittedly, it’s a chicken and the egg discussion about whether Johnny was helping drive the national conversation about these ideas, or whether he was simply responding to the zeitgeist of 70s America, but clearly everyone at the time was interested in exploring what lay in the grey area between the worlds of faith and of science.

For myself, I think a major moment came on the night of August 1, 1973 when I was watching The Tonight Show with my parents, as I so often did. One of Carson’s announced guests for the night was someone I’d never heard of, a nobody psychic by the name of Uri Geller. During his appearance Geller was supposed to try to bend a spoon using psychic energy, but the demonstration (aided by fellow guest Ricardo Montalban) was — let’s be perfectly frank — underwhelming. The extremely close camera work ensured that Geller couldn’t simply use sleight of hand to swap the unbent spoon in Montalban’s hand for an altered one. At the end of it, the spoon seemed to have a barely perceptible bend it that the guests all claimed hadn’t been there before, but it was hardly a show-stopping demonstration. While Carson, Montalban and Macmahon all politely tried to hide their disappointment, Geller became defensive. He blamed bad vibes, accused Carson and the audience from putting too much pressure on him that drained him of his metaphysical “strength”. Carson tried to apologize and reassured his guest that he believed in him.

Regardless of how much that spoon did (or did not) actually bend, I was struck by the fact that here were four well-known, supposedly reputable grownups, talking seriously and credulously about psychic phenomena on national television. By Carson seeming to take this idea seriously, I felt as though I (and the rest of the audience) were being given permission to believe that such things might be possible and were worthy of investigation.

GOIN’ ON A (SPOON) BENDER - Despite his poor performance on Carson, Geller soon became the poster child of psychic experiments in ESP and telekinesis, and regularly turned up on talk shows and programs devoted to psychic phenomenon throughout the 70s. Though several associations of stage magicians have denounced him as a fraud over the years, Geller maintains that he possesses real powers.

In 1974, a year after Geller’s evident psychic “misfire” on The Tonight Show, an announcement about an agreement between Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and U.S. President Richard Nixon would fire imaginations all across America. Following a successful tour through England, a travelling show of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb goods — Treasures of Tutankhamun — would come to the United States so that every Bob, Dick, and Harry could lay their eyes on the glory of King Tut’s gold-plated sarcophagus. It would become one of the biggest and most defining cultural events of the decade.

Even before the tour could arrive in America however, everyone and their Anubis-cosplaying dog was looking for opportunities to cash in on the rising wave of Egyptomania. Not since Howard Carter’s discovery of the boy king’s treasures in 1922 had there been such tremendous interest in anything to do with the land of the Nile. Almost immediately busts of Tut, and Nefertiti statuettes, and ankhs, and cartouche necklaces, and posters of the Valley of the Kings started turning up in the most backwater gift shops far, far away from any place the tour would actually ever visit. Comedian Steve Martin would later turn this new-fangled American fascination into the chart-topping hit “King Tut” in 1978. A hasty revival of Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge’s The Egyptian Book of the Dead — crammed to overflowing with 19th century translations of classical Egyptian hieroglyphic texts — started popping up at mass market booksellers like B. Daltons and Waldenbooks as recommended reading for those seeking the esoteric, lost knowledge of the Egyptians — so naturally, Gene brought a copy home for me to read. This bizarre magic-tinged world of animal-headed, self-birthing gods arrived at just the perfect time to feed into the supernatural frenzy of the 1970s.

My own personal encounter with Egyptian-flavored new age mysticism was through the book Pyramid Power published in 1974 by Max Toth and Greg Nielsen. The front cover of the book was adorned with a pyramid radiating lines of power, and was irresistibly captioned: the secret energy of the ancients revealed…the great mystery! (How could I — as a self-respecting eight-year-old scientific peer — possibly refuse the opportunity to learn the secrets of the ancients?!) The central thesis of this weighty tome of wisdom was that the pyramids weren’t just buildings, but actually huge psychic batteries that collected metaphysical energy that would preserve any organic material contained within them. It wasn’t that the pyramids housed special machinery to accomplish this feat or even that they were created out of any special materials (I mean seriously, there weren’t even any tana leaves involved? Kharis is disappointed in you Messrs. Toth and Nielsen!) Just the simple fact that the pyramids were, well, pyramid shaped was evidently all that it took to harness this theoretical power.

This idea of objects serving as psychic batteries wasn’t original to Pyramid Power. It was actually a topic that was being hotly discussed in the 70s by metaphysics bros largely thanks to the publication of a book published in 1968 by Erich von Däniken…but we’ll get to him and the chief subject of his book shortly. If you want to wander even further back, you can go down the rabbit hole of Plato’s perfect solids and the alchemical associations they were given during the Middle Ages…but we digress.

Beyond talking about the Egyptian pyramids, Toth and Nielsen suggested that if one sat inside a pyramid, one could attain greater longevity, reduce blood-pressure, achieve greater mental focus, enjoy greater sexual pleasure, receive spiritual insights, and generally achieve higher states of consciousness — you know, the same kit and kaboodle of stuff that all the 70s health and wellness bros were promising — if only you were willing to exercise, eat granola, and give up every other single food you ever loved.

Being that I wanted all the benefits that were promised by the book, I decided to test their claims. With my mother’s somewhat dubious permission (I mean it wasn’t witchcraft and there weren’t any demonic incantations involved), I destroyed a pair of wire coat hangers (in the name of science), fashioned a six-inch high tabletop pyramid, and carried it to my elementary school. For about a week I wore it as a hat on the playground during recess but found that I couldn’t really tell if I was any smarter while wearing it. (Undeniably I had to be sexier.) When the results of that test were inconclusive, I decided to try another of Pyramid Power’s core claims that could be more quantitatively observed, namely that you could use a pyramid to preserve food. Setting up an experiment on the counter of my fourth-grade homeroom, I brought in two pieces of bread and allowed them to moulder, one beneath my pyramid, and the other set just outside of it. Both of them rotted at the same pace. I repeated the experiment again with apples, but once again Egyptian metaphysics utterly failed me. It appeared that for all the hoopla the book and its authors were getting in the popular media, their claims were just another bit of 70s paranormal chicanery to disappoint me.

READ LIKE AN EGYPTIAN - Budge’s Egyptian Book of the Dead (left) was a fascinating first exposure to Egyptian hieroglyphs and sparked my early curiosity about ancient languages, linguistics, and non-Judeo-Christian philosophies and religions. Pyramid Power on the other hand (right) allowed me a wear a pyramid hat years before Devo tried to cop my style (albeit they called them “Energy Domes” and they were based on a Bauhaus light fixture.)

If there was anything that got more media attention in the 70s and captured the popular imagination even more than psychics or King Tut, it had to do with what was going on over American skies. Between coverage of NASA’s moon shots and reports that the Russkies were up there watching us from satellites and spy planes, the eyes of our nation were glued to the heavens with a mixture of both amazement and fear. All of us were wondering what was really going on up there? Was that moving dot a plane? A satellite? A weather ballon? A flight of starlings? Swamp gas? Venus? Angels? Could it be that all those reports of UFOs on the evening newscast were actually aliens in flying saucers visiting us from some far-off star?

Today we live in world where virtually everyone is carrying a relatively good camera with them at all times. When there’s a strange light in the sky, there’s a good chance that there will be dozens, possibly even hundreds of photos and videos taken of that same object that will appear almost instantly on social media. It’s easy to see most of these objects for what they are, absolutely ordinary phenomena that might be visually interesting but have entirely earthbound explanations. But the nature of UFO investigations in the 70s (and for that matter investigations of cryptids like bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster) was an entirely different experience. Quality photos were almost non-existent. Mostly there were blurry Polaroids, under-exposed slides, and lots and lots of bad drawings. Few witnesses were willing to come forward and talk publicly about their experiences for fear of ridicule, but nevertheless everyone had a cousin, or a neighbor, or a co-worker who was happy to share the story.

Little serious analysis of these events was available to the public, though a whole cottage industry of UFO-related magazines began to fill newstands by the middle of the decade. As a kid I hungrily grabbed up every issue of the UFO Report I could get my hands on. At the same time, I got to know the names of research organizations like MUFON that had been founded in 1969, and important UFO researchers like J. Allen Hynek who had been a scientific advisor to the U.S. Airforce for Project Blue Book, a secret government program that had been tasked with finding out the truth about UFOs.

THEY CAME FROM THE TV - The UFO Incident (left) was a 1975 made-for-TV movie starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Patterson about the famed case of Betty & Barney Hill, a couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens in 1961. Project U.F.O. (right) was produced by Jack Webb (of Dragnet fame) using files from Project Blue Book as the foundation of episodes for his television series which ran for two seasons on NBC. I remember watching both of these UFO centered productions when they first aired.

When it came to “big names” in UFO studies in the 1970s, no one juiced up the paranormal conspiracy community like German whackadoodle author Erich von Däniken. His Chariots of the Gods — first published in English in 1969 and then released as a documentary in the U.S. in 1971 — famously asserted that not only were space aliens real, but they had been visiting Earth since our ancient past, and have been actively intervening in our evolutionary progress all along. According to him, the Egyptian pyramids were obviously of alien design since they were too sophisticated for humans to have built (rude and insulting to ancient humans everywhere, and absolutely dead wrong). He also said that the Nazca lines in Peru had to be alien landing strips since they were clearly meant to be observed from above. Another one of his famous claims was that the special shape of the ark of the covenant (see, I promised you we’d get back to this) demonstrated that it had been designed by aliens as a psychic capacitor.

While von Däniken’s list of “contributions” to anthropological knowledge and serious research into parapsychology is long, damning, and deeply egregious, he unquestionably had an impact on pop culture. Without his mixture of UFOs and ancient cultures, we very well might never have experienced Raiders of the Lost Ark, X-Files, and Stargate, all of which borrowed from Däniken’s store of poorly conceived conspiracy theories and extraterrestrial mythologies.

ROCKET MAN - Another one of Erich von Däniken’s claims is that the sarcophagus lid of Mayan King Pakal depicts the ancient ruler riding in a rocketship. Anthropologists counter that this is a completely uninformed interpretation of traditional Mayan iconography, and that the element von Däniken identifies as rocket exhaust is a traditional representation of a snake, and Pakal’s outfit is not a spacesuit but traditional Mayan regalia.

So before we bid farewell to this final entry of the Supernatural 70s series, I would be remiss if I didn’t devote at least a few lines to everyone’s favorite cryptid, the great American skunk ape, aka sasquatch or bigfoot. Although there were never so many reports of it as there were of UFOs, sightings of the big fella were still regular enough to keep my friends and family interested in someday going out to try to get a picture of one. I always knew someone who knew someone who claimed that they’d seen one walking through a field on their farm, or crossing in front of their car on a country road in the middle of the night, or looking in their window, or even banging on the door of their trailer. But no one ever had any pictures, and no one had footprints. He was like smoke, a ghost, a story. A boogeyman that you really didn’t want to encounter.

Of course, growing up in Indian Country, I also heard stories about other creatures, a ghost panther that was said to be haunting the hills near Stilwell, the deer lady paying visits to bad men in Adair County. But there was only one person I knew who claimed to have a first person encounter with a genuine creature of legend. My dear, sweet, Christian mother who would adamantly tell you she didn’t believe in such things admitted to me rather reluctantly that one time, when she was a little girl and alone on the farm, she had encountered a goat man. She’d found him standing at the end of the gravel road leading up to my great grandmother’s house. She described him as dark eyed, sporting a long beard and horns, and having a sack thrown over his back. He stared at her for a long moment, as if deciding something, and then at last he turned away and disappeared into the swirling dust of an Oklahoma afternoon. Who she thought he really was she would never say, but I definitely got the feeling she thought she’d been spared from something unspeakable that day.

And with that my dear friends, I come to the close of this series, and wish you the very spookiest and weirdest of all Halloweens.

#Paranormal #Occult #PeaceOfMindBooks #Tulsa #Telekinesis #KingTut #PyramidPower #UFO #Egypt #Cryptid #GoatMan

It crouched in shadows, waited until the skies turned black and the winds howled and the windows shook, waited until we had no choice but to descend the steps and keep the wretched thing company. Once we gathered, it would open a single, unblinking eye on us, and it would begin a recitation of town names, and trailer parks, and intersections, places which once had been but now no longer were, places forevermore erased from the face of earth. And so for hours there my family would sit, entranced by our cyclopean demon, fervently hoping that its next apocalyptical pronouncement would not include anything about us.

If you haven’t lived in America’s so-called “tornado alley,” you might not fully appreciate that a television set occupies a special place in the lives of alley-folk. Beyond being a source of entertainment to us, or a window on current world events, a television served as a safety device. It told us where the tornadic storms were, where they were going, and whether or not we should get Fluffy out of the yard. It also served as an anxiety dispenser as we watched the tornadoes pass by - or more frequently through - the places where our friends and loved ones lived. Given this, you can understand why so many of us wanted televisions in our basements. We needed something to watch while we were huddling down there in the dark and hoping not to die. Furthermore, with TV, we had a pretty good idea when it was safe to come out of our hidey-holes.

Of course, one of the big problems with using a TV for this purpose was power. During a tornado, it was always possible that the electricity would get knocked out by high winds or lightning strikes. Battery-powered radios were certainly an option, but nothing beat being able to see on radar exactly where the action was going down. Thankfully, for those of us who had to deal with this quandary, Sears popped up in the mid 1970s with a portable, (seemingly ten-thousand pound), 13 inch, battery-powered television set that would allow us to stay on top of the news even when the power went out. Being the safety-conscious woman that she was, my mother dutifully bought one of these believing that we could keep it in the basement for emergencies. I, however, had other plans.

Like most children my age, I didn’t have a television in my room. Beyond the fact that such things would have been considered irresponsibly extravagant back in the day, the prevailing wisdom of the time was that TV was bad for children. It disrupted our sleep patterns. It gave us nightmares. It led to bed-wetting, anti-social tendencies, communist sympathies, and probably Satan worship. When added to the fact that I, like my mother, was a nocturnal creature with insomniac tendencies, the last thing my parents wanted to do was put a TV in my room. But the devil of the thing was, it proved almost immediately to be an effective mobile babysitter for me. When we made long distance trips out of town, my parents didn’t have to make special arrangements anymore so that I could watch Night Gallery or Star Trek. When my mother taught night school for adults or later at the Salvation Army unwed mother’s home, it was easy enough to park me in a nearby room with a pair of headphones to keep me distracted. So when I began to start keeping the portable TV in my bedroom at night so I could watch late night horror movies, my battle had already been won.

DON’T ADJUST YOUR TV - A Sears 13” portable television similar to the one my family bought in the late 1970s (ours was brown, and only displayed black and white). Not only did this become my gateway to fantastic television, but it would also become the monitor I used to connect my Atari 400, my first writing tool along with being my first computer gaming platform.

In addition to all of the Universal horror flicks from the 1920s-1950s that I already loved, my illicit little TV introduced me to the heavily Bowdlerized 1960s versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy presented by the greatest house of horror ever, Hammer Films. I would also discover the magnificent cycle of Poe films made for American International which enshrined a new triumvirate of terror formed by Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price. But above all else, it was a movie made in 1970 that I would discover during an “afternoon movie” on Tulsa’s KOKI that would become one of my favorite horror movies.

I can’t honestly count the number of times that I’ve watched The Abominable Doctor Phibes. Before the advent of home video, I made sure I caught every airing of it on TV, and if it ran in the film room at a local convention, I’d drop everything to make sure I was there to watch, regardless of the hour. I’m fairly certain I squealed out loud with joy the first time I found it on video cassette, and I’ve owned a version of it (and its sequel) in practically every medium in which it has appeared since.

Starring Vincent Price at his most malevolent but velvety-voiced best, Doctor Phibes follows the story of a hideously disfigured genius hell-bent on avenging himself on the doctors who failed to save his dead wife. Aided by his gorgeous assistant Vulnavia, he uses the ten biblical plagues as inspiration as he offs his victims one-by-one with a stylish sense of aplomb, all between performing private pipe organ recitals inside an art deco tomb. If you’ve never seen it, you’ve missed one of the most gloriously bonkers, over-the-top horror feasts of all time.

SWEET VULNAVIA: The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a deliciously fun cult favorite, and altogether one of the most stylish horror movies ever created.

Our portable TV became a frequent co-traveler with me as we took long trips to visit various relatives scattered across the state of Oklahoma. Most frequently I had it with me when we headed down to my grandparents’ farm south of Haskell. Their home was an old, creaky homestead situated on a hundred acre plot of land in the middle of nowhere, accessible at the time only by long, desolate stretches of gravel road. Without the TV it was easy to feel isolated on the trips back home. The world outside our station wagon was often pitch black, with nothing visible but dark clumps of trees that crowded too closely to the road. Sometimes things would appear in our headlights, appearing and disappearing before we could ever clearly identify what they were. I didn’t like to think about what might be lurking unseen just outside of our view, what might be watching us from the shadows. These fears would be greatly amplified and played upon by the next movie in my list.

In November of 1972, The New CBS Tuesday Night Movies presented what was easily one of the most traumatizing horror films of my young life, namely the made-for-TV movie, Gargoyles. Starring Cornel Wilde and Jennifer Salt (later of TV’s Soap fame), the story follows the research trip of Dr. Boley and his daughter as they travel through New Mexico to a roadside attraction, Uncle Willie’s Desert Museum. Uncle Willie (played by Woody Chambliss) has invited Dr. Boley to see something he’s got hidden in his shed that he doesn’t show to all his tourists, namely the skeleton of an ancient gargoyle! As Willie unspools the ancient Indian legends about the creatures for his visitor, the shed is suddenly attacked, the building catches fire, and Willie is killed in the chaos.

Fleeing the burning building, Dr. Boley and his daughter leap into their station wagon and head off down the road. Confused and horrified by what’s just happened, they decide to play back the recording of Uncle Willie’s tale in the hopes of figuring out what the hell is going on. No sooner than the tape gets rolling, however, their station wagon is beset by a flying gargoyle. Landing on the roof, it attempts to claw itself inside while Boley steers wildly to try to shake it off, eventually ditching the creature in the weeds. (It is thanks to this scene that being in a car in the middle of the night on a gravel road still gives me the heebie jeebies!)

WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO REACH YOU ABOUT YOUR CAR WARRANTY: Although it was a made-for-TV movie with a relatively low budget, Gargoyles featured some truly outstanding creature effects created by the legendary Stan Winston. The lead gargoyle was brilliantly portrayed by actor and former football star, Bernie Casey, best known previously for his role as Blackula.

The terror of the open road that Gargoyles inspired in me as a child was not something that afflicted my father. If anything, he likely would have spent all his time behind the wheel of a car on his way to god-knows-where if he hadn’t had a wife and two kids to support. Because both of my parents were teachers and had the summers off, we had the luxury of taking a long road-trip every summer. In most cases we didn’t even know where our father was taking us when we got started, but only that we should expect to be on the road for a long time and be prepared for practically any contingency. This meant that we kicked off every trip with a silver, coffin-sized ice chest that extended the entire width of the station wagon that was stuffed full of Oscar Meyer hot dogs, bologna, American cheese, Miracle Whip, mustard, milk, a couple of loaves of Rainbow bread, and a box each of Twinkies and Ding Dongs. On a split second notice we’d be tumbled out of our beds at dawn with our noses pointed toward Destination Anywhere.

This devil-may-care attitude of my father in regard to our travel plans meant that we often ended up in peculiar circumstances. On more than one occasion I can recall driving through storm systems that were spawning tornados in front of or behind us, and spending some nerve-wracked evenings in motels that lacked convenient storm shelters. More than once we slept in rest stops when we discovered that the towns where we’d been anticipating pulling in for the night had no vacancies. Or even motels. In the age before car navigation systems we often ended up lost because of my father’s predilection for “short cuts.” On one particularly memorable night at about three o’clock in the morning while rolling down a single-lane road in Colorado, we were startled by a sudden Close Encounters-like light that erupted in the middle of the road in front of us. Men with guns appeared at our car windows and we were coolly informed that we’d found the secret entrance to an air force facility, and we needed to turn around and go back to wherever we’d come from in a hurry.

When Race With the Devil starring Peter Fonda was released in 1975, I felt almost as if someone had been spying on our family experiences for inspiration. Combining an accidental encounter with Satan-worshippers while on a road trip in a Winnebago, Race is quite possibly the most 70s horror movie ever conceived. Camping and road trips were all the rage in the early to mid 70s, and Winnebagos were one of the most lusted after commodities of bored suburban dads (I spent more than a little time haunting car lots in Tulsa with my father as he drooled over these automotive beasts.) The 70s were also the golden age of cinematic car chases, so mixing all of these elements together had to have been a no-brainer for the movie’s producers. It would become the movie that made you too terrified to take a break at a deserted rest stop ever again.

HELL ON FOUR WHEELS: Peter Fonda co-starred with the always amazing Warren Oats in this non-stop action thriller from 20th Century Fox.

Wiccans were a recurrent target of the horror movies of the 1970s, and their beliefs and practices often were wildly distorted in order to cast them in the role of evil, devil-worshipping, murder-minded villains. These films as a whole perpetuated harmful myths about a largely marginalized community, and I can say from personal experience that the vast majority of the self-proclaimed witches that I’ve ever met have been kind, nature-loving peaceniks who bear no resemblance whatsoever to the cauldron-stirring variety found on film. That said, if we view the witches of cinema as wholly made up monsters rather than representatives of any real world religious community, there are some exceptionally good witchy horrors that came out of the era.

Crowhaven Farm is quite possibly one of the best of the bunch, rising far above the rest with a well-crafted story that elevated it above its cohort. Diving into the familiar waters of clandestine conspiracies, mysterious pregnancies, and creepy children, it also touched on another paranormal subject about which many other filmmakers became obsessed during the supernatural 70s, namely reincarnation.

Released originally in 1970, Crowhaven Farm popped up periodically in reruns and originally caught my attention during a late night showing because, for whatever reason, I conflated the star Hope Lange with Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery (in retrospect I’m not sure how I made this mistake, aside from the fact that they were both pretty blonde housewives in shows about witches.) In Crowhaven, Lange and her husband move into an old house in the country, but shortly thereafter she begins to be haunted with nightmares of being crushed to death during the Salem Witch Trials, dreams which she will soon learn are not dreams at all but memories of her previous life as the condemned witch “Meg” Carey. Filled with several twisty plot turns, this sophisticated suspensefest feels like something bigger than the made-for-TV movie that it was.

CRUSHING EVIL: The puritans gather to stone “Meg” Carey to death for witchcraft in one of Lange’s memories of her past life in Salem. Prior to her role in Crowhaven, Lange starred in a short-lived TV series adaptation of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Another common supernatural fixation of the 1970s had to do with the body of water found between the southern tip of Florida, the island of Bermuda to the east, and the island of Puerto Rico in the south. Commonly known as the Bermuda Triangle, this region has a long history of mysterious nautical legends ranging from missing ships, missing airplanes, strange fogs, electromagnetic disturbances, UFO sightings, and all sorts of other weird phenomena. Stories about it made regular rounds in newspapers, news programs, and in documentaries all through the decade. For me, however, that region of the Atlantic Ocean is fixed forever in my imagination thanks to the chilling ABC horror thriller, Satan’s Triangle.

Released in 1975, Satan’s Triangle kicks off with a pair of Coast Guard pilots being called in to rescue a stranded boat. Once there, they discover a priest hanging dead by his ankles from the main mast, another man dead in the forward hatch, another seemingly floating in mid-air below decks, and the only survivor a terrified but speechless woman hiding in a darkened cabin. After the initial attempt to rescue her fails because of an accident, one of the rescuers is forced to remain on board with the woman as she begins to recount the eerie events that left her the only personal alive aboard the drifting vessel. Even as rescue finally does arrive for them both, however, a final twist reveals that nothing is what it appears to be.

LET’S GO SAILIN’ WITH SATAN: Kim Novak and Doug McClure star in this taut little supernatural thriller from director Sutton Roley. As with Crowhaven Farm, over the years my mind played strange tricks on me, and until I was able to later re-watch it in the 2000s, I was thoroughly convinced that Roddy McDowell had been in the cast (spoiler: he wasn’t.) Combining elements of the Flying Dutchmen with various legends about the Bermuda Triangle, this remains one of my favorite sea-bound horrors.

In the very same year that Doug McClure was making the biggest mistake of his Coast Guard career in Satan’s Triangle, one of my all-time favorite horror heroes took his first bow. Kolchak: The Night Stalker starring Darren McGavin followed the adventures of intrepid newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak as he tried to stop, or at least report on, the innumerable supernatural horrors that plagued the cruel streets of Chicago. During his brief tenure on TV he faced down vampires, demons, dream monsters, zombies, Aztec mummies, living suits of armor, and a whole host of other menacing monsters. Inspired by these adventures, television producer Chris Carter would later go on to create the X-Files which bore an incredible debt to The Night Stalker. Carter would even go so far as to introduce a character played by Darren McGavin as the originator of the FBI’s X-Files, giving the fans an in-universe meta-acknowledgement that Mulder and Scully had Carl Kolchak to thank for their start.

What I loved about Carl, and what I know others connected with as well, is that Carl wasn’t a slick, well-respected reporter. He worked for a boss who didn’t respect him, and didn’t believe any of the bizarre stories that Kolchak brought to the paper. But Carl had street-savvy, and he knew his way around the the rejects of his community. He was frequently broke. More often than not he bungled his way to success, but he always got his story regardless of whether he could convince his editor to print the truth. In so many ways he mirrored other television detectives of his era like Peter Falk’s Columbo and James Garner’s Rockford, loveable oddballs all that we were rooting for because we could see ourselves in them. This identification was especially important to me because he arrived around the time that I was beginning to think about my future career as a writer, and the evocative idea of a monster-hunting reporter took a firm hold of my imagination.

LISTEN TO ME, TONY: Although Kolchak: The Night Stalker only ran for one season, it became a cult hit and would go on to influence several other horror programs, most notably Chris Carter’s X-Files.

For the bulk of the 1970s, I discovered horror movies thanks to their appearance on late night or afternoon movie programs available through my trusty portable TV. Most of those films would be made-for-TV productions like those I’ve listed above. For this reason I missed the original theatrical runs of important movies like The Exorcist, The Omen, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Amityville Horror. I would discover these classics only years later when I was able to rent them on VHS away from the disapproval of my parents. My long isolation from horror on the big screen would at last come to a screaming end with the arrival of 1978’s The Manitou.

To be honest, I don’t really recall much about the movie. I’ve only ever seen it one time, but I do remember being seriously freaked out about its weird combination of reincarnation, self-aware tumors, and Native American spiritualism. I’m not even sure I really got it all at the time, but it was nothing at all like the relatively genteel horror flicks I’d remembered watching at home on my tiny screen. But however good or bad it might have been, it represented one of my first steps towards adulthood.

WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST WATCH: The Manitou was a deeply messed up movie based on a book of the same name by horror writer Graham Masterson. I do not recommend viewing it if you are at all bothered by any lumps, bumps, or growths that you have on your body.

#Supernatural #70s #Witchcraft #Reincarnation #BermudaTriangle #Movies

“I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered.”

-- H.P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”

It’s difficult to be a ghoul when you were intended by your parents to be an apostle. I was raised in a time and place where it was not only assumed that I’d be a good little devotee of the church, but it was expected that I’d grow up to be a fervent, Bible-pounding proselytizer of the AMAZING GOOD NEWS!!!! Before I’d ever been a sinful gleam in my father’s eye, my mother frequently attended the crusades of Billy Graham. I’d had the fortune (?) to grow up in Tulsa, Oklahoma which was home to Oral Roberts University, officially making my hometown the crossbar of the buckle of the Bible Belt.

As a kid my childhood routine was strongly ordered. Sunday school and church twice on Sundays. Wednesday night church as well. Bible study and prayers every night before bed. Both of my parents taught Sunday school for the youngest kids in our church, and I was defacto enforcer to keep some of the more “troublesome” kids in line as my parents laid down THE LAW. Frequently too there were cartoons produced by Disney featuring that rat-bastard Jiminey Cricket who was supposed to be our kindly voice of conscious but I’d grow to hate him as the All Seeing, All Controlling monitor of everything I ever did. Come summer time I was riding the bus with the pastor to church every day for Vacation Bible School to ensure that not one single sinful thought ever entered my pre-pubescent mind. But there’s something to be said about trying to tamp down the lid on all that, to make sure every thought is clean, and pure, and in the absolute service of the All Mighty. The more that I was preached to about hell and brimstone and the eternal punishment that was waiting to pounce on my sin-tainted soul, the more interested I became in reading and watching the things that were supposedly lurking out there in the shadows to imperil me. Honestly, it was almost as if they’d wanted me to become a horror fiend. The most paradoxical thing about my intense religious upbringing is that my parents - most particularly my mother - were strangely inconsistent in the ways in which both my older brother and myself were raised. Neither of my parents ever read for pleasure for themselves, but there wasn’t a single night of my childhood when I wasn’t read to sleep until I was old enough to read for myself. By the time I hit elementary school I was already a voracious reader and reading at a grade level far in advance of where other kids my age were. Awards were given out every semester for the student who read the most books and I routinely read more books than the pre-printed certificates even accounted for. Somehow, no one had ever thought a kid my age might blow through more than 25 books in a semester!

Feeding a literary appetite like that wasn’t easy. Being a good boy, I’d read all the wholesome things I was supposed to read beyond my assigned Bible readings. Dick and Jane. The Poky Little Puppy. Clifford the Big Red Dog. Winnie the Pooh. Pippi Longstocking. Frog and Toad are Friends. Bedtime for Frances. Go Dog Go. Curious George. The Richard Scarry Treasury (which while I loved them, I was disappointed that despite the author’s name they weren’t at all scary.) Of course, as I mentioned in part one of this series, I’d snuck in a few juvenile-oriented books with ghost or monster themes to them, but those titles always skidded past my mother’s radar because the supernatural elements within them were little more than window dressing. Casper and Gus were happy, friendly ghosts who were going out of their way trying not to frighten the people they encountered. The terrible creatures of Where the Wild Things Are are easily dismissible as figments of Max’s sleepy imagination. Sometimes I’d also sneak in a few comic books that were supposed to be good for me because they were bible stories or Classics Illustrated. But as the material I was watching and reading became more sophisticated and less about how a child should behave, the less comfortable my parents became.

FRIENDLY MONSTERS - My favorite bits of early reading were always laced with monsters and elements of the supernatural. The books about Gus the Ghost were probably my first truly obsessive reads, and I re-read Where the Wild Things Are so many times that my childhood copies literally fell to pieces and I’ve had many copies over the years.

SPOOKY COMICS: Classics Illustrated exposed many children to their first classical works of literature, and I was absolutely hooked on the volumes which covered Shakespeare, particular Macbeth and Hamlet, both of which played heavily with supernatural elements like ghosts, witches, curses, and prophesies.

An important breaking point for my mother’s tolerance would come on October 27 of 1973 with an episode of the Star Trek animated series entitled “The Magicks of Megas-Tu.” Written by Larry Brody, the story followed the crew of the Starship Enterprise as they are caught in a mysterious storm and thrown into an alternate universe where science doesn’t work but magic does.

Aided by a horned man named Lucien who appears on the bridge and repairs the damaged Enterprise, they are advised not to attempt to use magic themselves to avoid attracting attention, but the advice falls on deaf ears and the crew find themselves abducted and transported to a place which resembles the witch-trial era of Salem, Massachusetts. Placed on trial by for acts of witchcraft alongside Lucien, Kirk and crew must square off against the prosecutor, Asmodeus. Spock indicates that there’s a good possibility that Lucien is actually either the Lucifer of Earth’s history, or at least his inspiration, but Kirk points out the witches of Salem had been wrongfully accused, Lucien hasn’t done anything wrong against them and so he defends Lucien against the prosecutor saying that he’d be willing to give his own life in exchange for Lucien to prevent him from being cast out.

The storyline would be a bridge too far for my mother. The idea that Lucifer might have been an alien rather than the devil, or that the hero of my favorite sci-fi TV series was prepared to save him even if wrongfully accused was too much. Even though presented entirely as a fictional scenario, it would set my mother permanently against all sci-fi, fantasy, or horror fiction that drifted into our household. It would cement of pattern of active censorship over genre fiction that had originated because of my brother Gene.

THE MAGICKS OF MEGAS-TU: Kirk defends himself, the rest of the crew, and the magic-wielding alien named Lucien against the Megans in a trial resembling the Salem witch trials. The episode was written by screenwriter Larry Brody who coincidentally also created a series called The Magician that debuted on CBS the same year and starred Bill Bixby.

Much of my taste for science fiction, fantasy, and the paranormal began thanks to the influence of my brother. He had been the one who pioneered the way for me, watching Lost in Space, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, The Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea during their original runs, then telling me about them long before I experienced most of them on my own. It was also thanks to him shoving The Hobbit at me in junior high that I ever discovered Tolkien (see Part Four of From Gamer to Game Dev), and also because of him that I first started scribbling down short stories. In so many respects there would never have been a Neal Hallford horror aficionado or game designer if not for his influence over me.

My long trek to the dark side started when Gene tried to check out books about bigfoot and UFOs and ESP from the Tulsa County bookmobile. Today this wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in most places, but in early 1970s Oklahoma this constituted scandal. Children weren’t supposed to read about that sort of thing. Dire conversations were had with my parents. Pastors were consulted. For this unspeakable crime against humanity, he found himself banned from the bookmobile! But the thing about banning things from kids is, they’re just going to find another way to get to what you don’t want them to have.

In the 70s, there were all kinds of interesting books and comics popping up on magazine stands and in convenience store “spinners.” If you wanted books about space travel, reincarnation, psychic phenomena, vampirism, cannibalism, or the occult, the books were certainly available. Gene was tantalized by all these verboten bits of reading material, but getting the allowance money to buy these things came from our mother, and she wasn’t about to pay for any of this potentially blasphemous trash. Interestingly enough, Gene found an ally in a lady that my family simply called “Aunt Patsy.”

My Aunt Patsy wasn’t actually an aunt, but an elderly 2nd or a 3rd cousin. She and I had a birthday in common, so I have many childhood photos of our shared celebrations. Unfortunately, Patsy was something of an outcast within our family and not terribly well-treated. I seem to remember whispered stories that she’d been a fan dancer or something of the sort when she was younger, but I was very little and I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. My father went out of his way to look after her, however, and she was practically a part of my daily life when I was small. Whatever the case may be, whether she was a closet radical, or she simply couldn’t say no to my brother, she would secretly slide him the money when my mother refused to pop for one of Gene’s “suhtonic” books.

Gene amassed a remarkable stash of books which, of course, became the core of my secret lending library as I aged up enough to read them. Ghost stories were my favorite, followed by weird tales of ESP or British stories that fell into the genre that is now known as “folk horror.” But there was one series of books in particular that latched into my brain, and even though in time I’d forget the titles and author names, the covers became indelibly burned into my brain. They all featured exactly the same design. Four illustrated panels on the front covers, and usually two panels on the back. The illustrations were all monochromatic, fantastically lurid line drawings that would have been right at home in the horror comics of the day. Each illustration would have wonderfully evocative captions like “Uncanny Granny’s bedtime tales that come true,” “The incredible dog who predicted his master’s death,” “He returned from the dead to rescue his son,” “His bizarre powers tracked down a hidden killer,” and “Rosemary’s candle is a warning from another world.” Published by Popular Library, they would become the books that would create my love for stories featuring the supernatural.

A COLLECTION OF CHILLING HORRORS: My recently reconstructed “Aunt Patsy” collection of Popular Library books about the paranormal. Although I’d forgotten the authors, titles, and publisher, I still remembered the images on the covers and after numerous Google keyword and image searches, I finally was able track these down from multiple sellers. They are ESP Forewarnings by Robert Tralins, Clairvoyant Women by Robert Tralins, Powers That Be by Beverley Nichols, Beyond Unseen Boundaries by Brad Steiger, Weird People of the Unknown by Robert Tralins, and Clairvoyant Strangers by Robert Tralins. (Not pictured is Supernatural Strangers by Robert Tralins).

Another set of books that I loved was a fantastic, illustrated encyclopedia called Man, Myth, and Magic released in 1970 by the Marshall Cavendish Corporation. Compiled from articles in a magazine of the same name, it was a wonderfully comprehensive 26 volume set with loads of photographs, drawings, and diagrams of all things supernatural. It also had articles covering topics which were not in and of themselves supernatural, but were weird or controversial enough to be of potential interest.

At some point during one of her regular Orwellian sweeps of our rooms to look for illicit reading materials, my mother happened upon said encyclopedia and while flipping through it stumbled on a helpful entry about the history of ritual parricide, i.e. the murder of one’s parents. Seeing this, she decided that this one entry out of thousands was advocating the practice, and was quite possibly the reason my brother had purchased all twenty-six volumes. The books were then summarily gathered, removed, burned, and my brother informed and punished ex post facto.

Now, for most families, the book burning would have been the end of the tale, but I didn’t grow up in most families. Before I relate the paradoxical aftermath of this, let me first refer you back to what I mentioned near the start of this post. My parents or my brother read to me to sleep nearly every night as a child. I was raised with a near reverential regard for both books and for reading. Burning a book, regardless of its content, was a cause for deep seated guilt. It simply isn’t done. But my mother had committed this unconscionable act - even in the name of correcting her Satan-deceived son - and she had in some way to make up for this. So what did my mother do? She reached into her purse, pulled out money, and gave him money with the idea that he would, now properly chastened, go out and buy something which would be wholesome and uplifting and lead him back to the Lord. Surprisingly to her, another copy of the encyclopedia would appear in his room shortly thereafter.

This would become a pattern for the remainder of our childhoods.

SUBVERSIVE TOMES: The first three volumes of Man, Myth & Magic in my possession (see what I did there) as I began reconstructing the set for my own collection. It is really an excellent reference as well a great time-capsule for views on the supernatural during the sixties and seventies.

I rhapsodized in Part III of my From Gamer to Game Dev series about my love for the works of both Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, so I won’t bore you with a lengthy reiteration here about how influential both of these authors were during my early teens. Suffice to say, I fell in love with supernatural horror novels largely thanks to the two of them, but neither of them was writing or publishing in the 1970s in any case — that’s just when I happened to encounter them. But there is one 70s novel that was an absolute rager on the bookselling charts, and one that I remember kids fiercely debating on my school bus. Naturally I had to pick a copy up for myself to see what all the fuss was about. As it turned out, Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror scared the living hell out of me.

Purportedly based on a true story, Amityville got under my skin because the details felt so relatable. It wasn’t a gothic novel set in a castle, the events didn’t happen a hundred years ago, and even the most overtly supernatural elements were painted in a utterly believable way. But the detail that got me, the one that kept me awake at night related to Jodie, the imaginary friend of the daughter, Missy Lutz. Described as a demonic pig, the book describes a scene in which Jodie’s glowing red eyes are seen looking in the window of Missy’s bedroom — which was not on the ground floor.

Years before ever reading the book, my brother and I had always shared a nightmare about otherworldly eyes looking into his bedroom window, a window that 12 feet above the ground of our back yard. A window that still gives me shivers to look out of at nighttime when I’m in my childhood home.

Goodnight kids!

#horror #supernatural #novels #occult #70s #PopularLibrary #StarTrek

Yet this train’s whistle! The wails of a lifetime were gathered in it from other nights in other slumbering years; the howl of moon-dreamed dogs, the seep of river-cold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand fire sirens weeping, or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighs, burst over the earth! ―

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

When I was a child, the carnivals came in October. They arrived on billowing floats and with shrieks of calliopes, paraded through crowds of cotton candy-huffing children and balloon dispensing clowns, winding through the streets of the city until they at last arrived in the Tulsa Fairgrounds with all the raucous pomp and circumstance of a victory parade. And it was a victory, at least for me, the defeat of the summers that I found oppressive, of the heat that shut my lungs, of the days that were far too bright and too long for my dark-loving soul. They were the celebration of fall and of Halloween and of my birthday month all at once, and to me they were the heralds for the best days of the year.

In many parts of the country carnivals and circuses had largely lost most of their draw by the early 1970s, but in the Tulsa of my early childhood they still constituted major events. They brought with them all of the traditional carnival trappings: halls of mirrors, funhouses with shifting floors or optical illusion-inducing architectures, “freakshows” featuring belly dancers, bearded women, two-headed calves, dubious cryptid curiosities strung together with baling wire and displayed under low-lighting. All of these came and went every year, but one ever-popular horror-inducing attraction during the fair was actually a permanent resident at the fairground-adjacent amusement park, Bell’s.

Bell’s Amusement Park opened in 1951 on the Tulsa State Fairgrounds. Founded by Robert Kiwanis Bell, it originally featured seven rides, and in 1968 would became home to one of it’s star attractions, the wooden roller coaster called the Zingo. In 1971, Bob Bell and his park-founding father Robert decided that the further addition of a dark ride would help grow attendance at the park so they turned to existing east coast attractions for inspiration.

Phantasmagoria, named by Bob, fused gore and ghostly apparitions in one of the longest dark rides of its time, delivering nearly seven minutes of horror for its riders. Its many shocks and scares are among some of my happiest memories of the Tulsa State Fair.

COME AND TAKE A DARK RIDE: Phantasmagoria opened in July of 1973 and remained in operation until its eventual demolition on June 19, 2007. Although the design of the dark ride was a collaboration between the Bell family and famous ride designer Bill Tracy, the carriages were entirely designed and built by the Bells, and replicas were later exported to dark rides at Joyland in Wichita, Kansas and Wonderland in Amarillo, Texas.

While Phantasmagoria would be the first dark ride I’d ever set foot on, it was not the only one of which I was aware. I’d first caught a glimpse of the granddaddy of all dark rides during a re-run of one of my favorite Sunday night television shows, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. In 1970, Kurt Russell and the Osmonds took a special tour of the recently opened Disneyland attraction, The Haunted Mansion.

For the rest of my childhood, The Haunted Mansion would become my most begged-for travel destination, but the cost was too prohibitive for my parents to make the long-distance visit from Oklahoma. Exiled in the Sooner State, I had to content myself with visitations via news articles or photographs. When Viewmaster released their reels with 3 dimensional views inside, I spent many joyous hours drooling over the stereographic images of the 999 happy haunts inside their creepy Victorian home. I was particularly entranced by the images of Madam Leota floating in her crystal ball, of the ghosts dancing in their ballroom, and of the top-hatted ghost performing at his pipe organ. These were images that would haunt my dreams for nearly a decade until I’d finally make my first visit to Disneyworld as part of a high school band trip to Orlando in 1981.

WELCOME FOOLISH MORTALS!: One of the many stereoscopic images of the Haunted Mansion that were available on the Viewmaster. As awesome as it was, my first in-person visit to the Mansion felt like a dream coming to life.

Another classic piece of Halloween-themed Disneyana was a party album originally released in 1964 featuring narration from actress Laura Olsher (the narrator is often misidentified as actress Greyson Hall, best known for playing Dr. Julia Hoffman in the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows). Re-released in the 1970s, the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the The Haunted House threaded together ten stories narrated by Olsher on the first side, while the second side isolated the sound effects into individual tracks of screams, thunder, lightning, fighting cats, dogs, creaking doors, explosions, crashes, birds, drips, and flying saucers.

During the 70s, the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House practically became a requirement if you were planning a holiday party or celebration. You could find it for sale at major national department stores like Sears, at local Oklahoma retailers like T.G.&Y., and sometimes even at convenience stores in the candy aisle. When I went out trick or treating, half the houses I visited had the record playing in the background, and my own family wore out at least three copies of it during the years we were handing out Halloween candy at my parents home. To this day, it still serves as the official soundtrack of my childhood memories of Halloween.

SPOOKY SOUNDTRACK: The original version of the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House released in 1964 featured a white sleeve, but for the 1973 re-release the sleeve was recolored orange. The same piece of art by Paul Wenzel appeared on both versions, and was the original concept art for Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

If, like myself, you grew up between the 1950s and the 1980s, chances are you had two options for obtaining a Halloween costume. You could either fabricate one yourself out of your parents’ discarded clothing, old sheets, your mother’s makeup kit, and possibly a discarded box, OR you could trot down to your local five and dime and pick up the always reliable costume in a box. For around five bucks you could live out your fantasy of being Dracula or Frankenstein or Snow White or Batman or maybe a cat, and you might even get the chance to wear it two or three times before you either outgrew it or it simply fell apart. (Although the boxes for these costume kits always prominently displayed that they were flame-retarded, it was not at all too uncommon to hear a horrifying story about a kid accidently setting these costumes on fire because of an unwatched jack o’ lantern candle).

TERROR IN A BOX: During my childhood I owned a costume in a box kit identical to this one and have strong memories of rampaging through my neighborhood in it while in search of sweets.

As the seventies wore on, I grew more exacting in my standards when it came to Halloween masks and apparel. The “costume in a box” simply wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. Higher quality and more realistic-looking full head latex masks were appearing on the market by the mid-decade, and after a great deal of nagging I convinced my mother to purchase my first legit mask, a terrifically-rendered Creature From the Black Lagoon mask at the Top Hat Magic Shop (at the time the best place in Tulsa to buy or rent costumes). Later on, I’d add a magnificent Mummy mask to my collection. Likely I would have continued to fill the walls of my room with all the heads of my favorite Universal Monsters, but money, wall space, and the limits of my mother’s patience kept that fantasy from ever materializing.

By 1975 I had grown into a serious fan not only of the stars of the Universal horror movies, but also of the special effects and make up teams who had made those movies possible. Then, when the October Scholastic Books catalogue arrived that fall, I found a book that would forever ignite my interest in special effects make up techniques. Movie Monsters: Monster Make-Up & Monster Shows To Put On by Alan Ormsby provided a step-by-step breakdown of the makeup that had been used on several classic horror movies. More than that, it also provided detailed, richly illustrated instructions on how to create monster effects using things that would be available in ordinary people’s homes. In short order I was fashioning werewolf faces, and Frankenstein heads, and mummy hands all on my own (while also wrecking my parents’ home in the process...sorry mom)!

HOME MADE MONSTERS: Movie Monsters: Monster Make-Up & Monster Shows To Put On by Alan Ormsby was published by Scholastic Books in 1975. Many of the make-up techniques it demonstrated would spark my interest in filmmaking, and would influence my thoughts on the making of our classic noir horror short, The Case of Evil.

I don’t think most people remember when or why they stopped Trick or Treating, but can pinpoint it to the year of my thirteenth birthday. As usual, my best friend, neighbor, and years-long Halloween co-conspirator David Guthridge and I grabbed our candy bags, put on our costumes, and set out to roam the night as we had on so many Halloweens past. We swept along our street, hit all our usual spots, laughing as compared our loot just as we had for all the years of our lives. At last we came to a house on the street behind our own, one we had visited many times, and we rang the doorbell, and we waited.

The porch light flickered. An old woman came to the door. Reflexively we held out our bags and uttered the magic incantation.

“Trick or Treat!”

But the old woman didn’t open the outer screen door. She didn’t smile or laugh. Her eyes went wide and her mouth gaped, and her expression filled with a look of abject terror.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!” she screamed.

“We’re just treat or treating, maam. See...”

“No you aren’t! You’re too old to be trick or treaters! Get out of here!”

“We’re sorry...”

“GET OUT OF HERE! I’M CALLING THE POLICE!”

And her door slammed in our faces. We turned and ran. We ran as fast as our legs could carry us so that we could get back home, ran so the the police couldn’t find us and charge us for being too old for trick or treating, too old for candy...

Too old for Halloween.

In the years since, that memory has always stung. It’s the defining moment at which I can say that my childhood officially ended...at least by the definition of others. To me, I’m still out there in the dark, on that porch, wondering how I was mistaken for a monstrous adult. It still hurts.

Years later I’d hear a song by Neil Young, a song he’d written when he became too old to enter a club with his younger-than-himself girlfriend. It reminds me eerily of what it was like that night on the last Halloween of my childhood:

Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain With the barkers and the colored balloons You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain Though you’re thinking that you’re leaving there too soon, You’re leaving there too soon.

#Halloween #Dark Rides #Bells #Haunted Mansion #Disney #Make Up SFX

“We’re mutants. There’s something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us - we’re soldiers writers.”

-- with apologies to the screenwriter of “Stripes”

Dear reader, I have the darkest of revelations to make to you, a truth when fully and wholly disclosed shall most assuredly chill you to the bone, a tale that shall make you question all that you hold to be true and good and holy about my personal history. While you may have come in search of that narrative designer best known for his works of interactive high fantasy, you should know that he is also a crafter of a darker art, a scribbler of twisted tales filled with ghosts, and ghouls, and gargoyles. I am, dear innocent, a devotee of horrors! Mwahahahaha!

[cue thunderclap, lightning, pipe organ music]

Given the genre of writing for which most of you know me, I forgive you if you think of me principally as a fantasy writer. I don’t object to that classification because I do enjoy mucking about with magic and dark woods and mysterious ancient civilizations. But if you are to truly know who I am as a writer, you must realize that the image I hold of myself is principally as a creator of weird tales.

To understand how and why I came to be drawn to this sub-genre of fantastic fiction, you first must understand that I come from peculiar folks. Maybe I don’t have the Ipswich look, or I didn’t grow up in a castle, but my pedigree for oddity has been there from the start. My mother was declared dead at birth by her doctor, and often heard voices calling to her in the dead of night that no one else could hear. Her mother would periodically ring us up to discuss events in our lives about which she couldn’t possibly have known. My father’s people still share ghost stories about a family homestead that burned down mysteriously in the 1960s. Even my older brother has outré memories about events he says cannot possibly be true, and as a kid was kicked off the Tulsa city bookmobile for attempting to check out books about UFOs, bigfoot, and ESP. It’s fair to say I was doomed - or destined - for weirdness from the start.

If the above listed circumstances had not been enough, I grew up in an area where neighbors whispered stories about a horrifically deformed Bulldog Man who stalked kids who “parked” on the Old North Road near my house. The state in which I was raised was rife with legends of bigfoots, deer women, and devil men. Even in my childhood household there existed a pantheon of mythological entities invented explicitly to keep me in line. If I was a good boy, The Repairman would leave me little gifts of Hot Wheels cars or candy. If I was being terrible, however, my father would dress in a skeleton costume, rise from the basement and threaten to drag me down into everlasting hellfire (evidently there was a secret portal in our basement.) There were monsters, monsters EVERYWHERE I looked in my childhood world. Given that I was told as a fledgling writer to write what I knew, how could anyone have been surprised that the first stories I wrote were filled with the supernatural?

NIGHTMARISH INSPIRATION - By far one of my favorite gothic paintings. “The Nightmare” by John Henry Fuseli (1781)

My formative years during the late sixties and early seventies took place at a strange juncture in our American cultural history. At the same time that we were loudly proclaiming the supremacy of scientific thought because we’d landed men on the moon, we were also in the midst of a counter cultural explosion of interest in astrology, witchcraft, ghosts, extra sensory perception, and flying saucers. Occult-related books were flying off the shelves as sales surged by more than 100% between 1966 and 1969. Cultural historians would come to refer to this is as the “occult boom,” and its aftershocks would impact popular cultural for decades to come.

My first contact with tales of the supernatural were innocuous, largely sanitized for consumption by children. I vividly remember watching Casper the Friendly Ghost and the Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I read to shreds numerous copies of both Where the Wild Things Are and Gus the Ghost. Likely the most important exposure for me was to the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? cartoon which attempted to inoculate us from our fears of ghosts and aliens by convincing us that ultimately the monster was always just a bad man in a mask. (It’s fascinating to me that modern incarnations of Scooby Doo seem to have completely lost this point and instead make all the monsters real.)

IT’S YOU!: Although the original cartoon Scooby Doo, Where Are You? ran only for one season from 1969 to 1970, it remained in heavy reruns and syndication for decades. It is notable for having been a program that perfectly embodied the conflict between reason and superstition in popular culture, and was originally intended to provide children with critical thinking skills so they would reject the idea of monsters, ghosts, and the like. Ironically, modern takes on Scooby Doo have almost entirely subverted this idea and usually present the culprits of their mysteries as real monsters (I’m not a fan of the new approach).

During that same time, television also introduced me to my first onscreen crush in the form of the beautiful and charming Samantha Stevens, a witch who struggles to not to use her powers while married to a frequently intolerant mortal advertising executive in Bewitched. The Munsters and The Addams Family gave me my first taste for “goth” living even before it would become all the rage in the dance clubs of the 1980s. Late night movies on TV would bring all the important horror classics of the past into my living room as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Godzilla all became childhood friends. Over time the darkened castles, creaking doors, foggy graveyards, howling wolves, and ever-present witches and vampires became so engrained in my psyche that today they remain the “comfort viewing” to which I retreat when I’m sick or in need of other distractions from modern life.

THE BEWITCHING SAMANTHA STEPHENS - Elizabeth Montgomery starred in Bewitched (1964 - 1972) as Samantha Stephens, a witch who married “mortal” advertising executive Darren Stephens (played for the first five seasons by actor Dick York). Inspired by movies like I Married a Witch (1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958), it was a long running series that explored the complex relationship dynamics between those who possess magic and those who don’t. Social commentators have referred to it as an allegory both for mixed marriages and also about the challenges faced by minorities, homosexuals, cultural deviants, or generally creative folks in a non heterogeneous community. It was also one of the first American television programs to portray witches not as worshippers of Satan, but simply as a group of people ostracized for their culture and their supernatural skills.

Even before I began elementary school, there was one piece of must-see gothic horror programming that I went out of my way to catch every day. Dark Shadows aired at 3:30 p.m. on our local ABC affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma which usually allowed me to catch most of it if I ran home from school (or even more if my mom or brother picked me up.) In theory it was a soap opera, but the show featured a regular parade of supernatural characters and themes. The lead was a 175 year old vampire named Barnabas Collins (played by Johnathan Frid), and the show revolved around his timeless pursuit of his lost love, Josette. It was also a program that regularly dealt with reincarnation, precognition, werewolves, time travel, witchcraft, and other occult themes. Though it regularly provoked criticism from religious groups about its content, it ran from June of 1966 until it’s final cancellation in April of 1971. (I would discover it in the early 1970s as it ran in syndication.) Dark Shadows would spin off two feature-length movies based on the original, a series of tie-in novels, an excellent reboot series in 1991 (starring Ben Cross as Barnabas), and a positively embarrassingly awful movie directed by Tim Burton in 1991.

WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD: Johnathan Frid starred as Barnabas Collins, one of the leading characters of the original Dark Shadows television series. The influence of the series cannot be understated. In many ways Dark Shadows paved the way for the inclusion of supernatural elements in other soap operas of the 1970s and the 1980s, and was largely responsible for the explosion of romance novels featuring supernatural themes over the same time period.

While Dark Shadows was a favorite early television program for me, another show would prove not only to be a borderline obsession, but also a major influence on my career as a storyteller. Night Gallery (1969-1973) was a weekly anthology television show from Rod Serling, better known as the creator and host of the original Twilight Zone. Like Twilight Zone before it, Night Gallery was a deep and complex commentary on the human condition, but unlike its predecessor the outcomes for the characters almost always skewed towards the horrific and the truly outré. In “The Painted Mirror,” an antiques dealer uses a magic painting to trap an enemy in the prehistoric past. Jack Cassidy plots to use astral projection to kill his romantic rival in “The Last Laurel” but accidentally ends up killing himself. In “Eyes” a young Stephen Spielberg directs Joan Crawford in a story about an entitled rich woman who plots to take the sight of a poor man. Week after week it delivered some of the best-written horror television of the early 1970s.

In retrospect I find it surprising that I was allowed to watch Night Gallery at all. I was very young while it was airing, and some of the content was dark and often quite shocking for its time. Nevertheless, I was so attached to the show that I’d throw a literal temper tantrum if I missed a single, solitary episode. If our family needed to go somewhere on an evening that Night Gallery was scheduled, either my parents would either have to wait until after it had aired before we left, or they’d make arrangements in advance with whomever we were visiting to make sure it was okay that I could watch Night Gallery there. I was, in a word, a fanatic.

SERLING THE GREAT - Every segment of Night Gallery was introduced by series creator Rod Serling standing before a painting created explicitly for the episode of the night. Director Guillermo del Toro credits Serling’s series as being the most important and influential show on his own work, even more so than the more famous Twilight Zone.

#horror #70s #occult #supernatural #television #writing

The book is currently available for pre-order. You can visit the Dark Horse book details page to find a link to your preferred bookseller.

https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/3015-322/Heroes-of-Might-and-Magic-30th-Anniversary-Retrospective-HC

#Author #Games #History #HeroesOfMightAndMagic #NewWorldComputing #Ubisoft #DarkHorse

Steve and I met when I was in early elementary school. He was a next-door neighbor to my grandmother and Uncle J.L. in Stilwell, and I’d see him about twice a month when my family drove down from Tulsa. We became friends because he was so frequently in and out of J.L.’s house that we pretty much considered him a member of the collective Hallford household. Given that he was about my age (he’s a year older than I am) and the only kid around for me to play with on a regular basis (apart from my cousin Joe Dotson who would occasionally turn up in town at the same time), we naturally fell in together.

I remember being captivated by Steve’s trampoline. His family was the first I ever knew that privately owned one, and weirdly enough it always somehow became the center of our games of Army or cowboys and Indians. In retrospect, it strikes me as funny that Steve ALWAYS insisted on being one of the cowboys in those scenarios rather than one of the Indians. While Steve and I are both Cherokees by birth, Steve is significantly more genetically Indigenous than I am, and also much more closely resembles what most people expect a Native American to look like. And maybe that’s the answer. When we were growing up, the Indians were almost always portrayed as the bad guys in movies and on television, and the cowboys were always the heroes. Steve definitely wanted to be the hero in whatever was going on.

The more time that I spent with Steve, the more I became convinced he wasn’t just the hero, but also one of the coolest guys I knew. He was seriously into comics, more so than anyone I was growing up with back in Tulsa. He took them so seriously that he was teaching himself how to create them, and I remember my amazement as I flipped through the pages of his comic Grocery Man featuring a hero of his own invention. (Later on, he’d use this skill to create a weekly humor comic strip for the Stilwell Democrat Journal.) He was also the first person I knew that had a complete (and pretty darned amazing) Captain America costume that hadn’t come out of a box, but had been custom made for him (I presume) by his mother. Every time I went to see him, it was a bit like visiting a tiny little Comic-Con with Steve as the one and only featured guest.

Of course, not everything we did revolved around our strange trampoline-centered war games or our long, digressive arguments about whether Marvel or DC had the superior superhero line up (I’m still team DC thanks to the Justice League of America + Justice Society of America, but I did love Spiderman and Doctor Strange from the Marvelverse). I remember playing a fair number of board games with Steve, but I’m a little fuzzy on what all he had on hand. I seem to recall Connect 4, Checkers, and maybe Battleship. There might have been a Stratego mixed in there too. He definitely had The Game of Life because I always see his den when I think about that gameboard, and I only ever played it with him. In truth, I probably would have tried anything that Steve put in front of me because as the arbiter of all things cool, I trusted his recommendations about games as much as I did everything else.

ORIGIN STORY - Steve’s art and his writing skills would be a little more sophisticated by the time he got around to creating his humor strip for the Stilwell DJ a few years later, but Steve’s love of heroism and fighting for the little guys was on display from very early on.

About three years after Grocery Man got its glow up in the local newspaper, I was visiting my Uncle J.L. in his new, purpose-built home that he’d moved into after marrying my Aunt Marianna. The new place wasn’t far from where he’d lived on Chesnut Street — only a couple of blocks, an overgrown crick, and a church parking lot separated the two houses — but I could no longer casually stroll next door to see Steve whenever I wanted. Now our visits had to be coordinated via phone call whenever my parents and I rolled into Stilwell. On the occasion in question, Steve told me that he had something new to show me, and wanted to know if he could bring it over to J.L.’s place. Naturally I was intrigued. Any recommendation from Lord Garrett was always worth checking out.

Once Steve arrived, he joined me in a back bedroom where I was busy playing something on my cousin Mark’s Atari 2600. After making some snarky remark about my less than dazzling reflexes, Steve tossed a box on the bed next to me and said, “Here, check this out. It’s called Dungeons & Dragons.” Although I liked the cover of what he was showing me, and the name was certainly evocative, a part of me was the tiniest bit wary. I was still a relatively new convert to fantasy fiction thanks to my brother’s rather strong-armed tactics in getting me to read The Hobbit. But given its name, presumably it had something to do with dragons, and I was interested in anything that involved fighting big scaly monsters. Putting aside my joystick, I settled back and Steve began to explain the whole concept of a role-playing game.

At the start, I liked the sound of it. I liked the idea of roaming through dungeons and gathering treasure and solving puzzles. I liked that I could be a hero and vanquish monsters. I really liked the idea that I could play a wizard and use magic. I totally saw why Steve who was the champion of all that was heroic got into this. All of it sounded amazing…but then it all started to get complicated. There was all of this other stuff I had to do before we could start playing. I needed to read a booklet to understand what a wizard was in the context of D&D. I needed to pick a race which would impact any additional abilities or handicaps. Rolling up a character (dice? these dice are weird, but cool) was fun, but what are attributes? What’s the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom (is this a Zen thing?)

Just write everything down on this character sheet Neal, and give him a name.

“Okay. He’s an elven magic user named…I don’t know…Ralph, I guess. I don’t know how elves name themselves. When do we get to the fighting monsters part?”

Choose an alignment.

Well he’s a good guy, right? I mean I’ll be fighting monsters. If he were evil he’d be the monster.

You still need to buy equipment for your character.

“Equipment? How do I buy equipment? I have money, like Monopoly dollars? Are there dollars in the box or…No?”

You have this amount of money listed here, and you just pick things off the equipment list.

“Great. So…I’ll buy a sword and chainmail!”

You can’t use either of those things. You’re a wizard, so you can’t wear any kind of armor or use any kind of sword. It’s in the rules.

“I…what?! I have to go in unarmed?”

You can take a staff.

“TO FIGHT AGAINST DRAGONS?!?!”

Fifteen minutes in, we haven’t actually played anything. We’re still learning rules. As Steve begins to read the rules about how combat will work, I start to realize with horror there’s going to be math involved. Bane of my existence. I was struggling through the worst math class of my young life, 9th grade Algebra, taught by a tyrannical old battleaxe named, of all things, MRS. SPARKS. She wore gallons of an unmistakable perfume that smelled exactly like burning wood, and you’d smell her Satanic majesty just passing by the open door of her classroom. If dragons could actually shapeshift into human form, she was clearly a math dragon.

Finally, after we get through the basics, I’m ready to go. I’ve got my character, I’ve got my stuff, and I think I know how to fight whatever Steve is going to throw at me.

“Okay, great! Get the game board and the player tokens out of the box.”

There isn’t one. I just describe everything to you as we go along.

“Well, how do I know where I can move or where I’m going?”

You’ll have to draw a map. [He hands me a pencil] Trust me.

I remember almost nothing of the actual adventure that followed. I don’t know if he was working off the sample dungeon in the back of the rules guide, or if he was just making up something new as he went along. Mostly I just remember having fun. I enjoyed his descriptions of things as I blundered through a dungeon doing increasingly stupid things. I loved the narrative, the back and forth, the glint in Steve’s eyes when I would ask if I could do X, Y, or Z and then hearing, for the first time, the classic Dungeon Master refrain, “You can certainly try,” and then reaping the rewards or punishments after I made an appropriate dice roll. In the end, I never met a dragon in that one — and only — D&D session with Steve. My recollection is that I made one stupid decision too many and I think Ralph…or whatever dumb name I gave him…sprang a trap that he couldn’t recover from and came to an ignominious end. But it didn’t matter. Steve did what destiny had appointed him to do. He had once again introduced me to something new, and it set me firmly on the road for more role-playing adventures to follow.

BY JEEVES, HOLMES! - Although the first version of Dungeons & Dragons created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson was released in 1974, the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (also sometimes called “The Holmes Version”) played a key role in D&D’s growing influence in the late 70s and early 80s. Edited by Dr. Eric Holmes and released in 1977, the Basic ruleset streamlined the experience to help introduce players to the core concepts of D&D, and limited players advancement up to 3rd Level. Beyond that, players were expected to learn the more complex version of the game — known as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons — which hit the market the same year as the Basic Set.

In introducing me to Dungeons & Dragons, Steve had both done me a huge favor and also burdened me with an equally huge problem. I wanted to play more, but Steve was the only person I knew that owned the game or knew the rules. Although I was still travelling to Stilwell with my family on a regular basis, we weren’t going down nearly as often as when my grandmother was still alive, and there were no guarantees I’d even be able to reach Steve whenever we were in town. After much consternation I realized that if I ever wanted to play D&D again, I was going to have to take the initiative. I’d buy the game, learn to be a Dungeon Master, and then recruit my own group of players. How hard could all of that be?

The first lesson I had to learn was that D&D still wasn’t on mainstream radars just yet. You couldn’t buy it at Sears, or J.C. Penny’s, or T.G.&Y. and even the big bookstores like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks wouldn’t be carrying it for years. It was only after harassing several businesses listed under the “Toys and Games” section of the local Yellow Pages that I finally found a place that said they had it in stock.

Discovering The Game Shop in the Farm Shopping Center in south Tulsa was a bit like walking into Narnia for me. They had every kind of game imaginable on their shelves: chess, checkers, puzzles, backgammon, poker supplies — all the stuff you’d expect to find in the toy aisle of any reasonably stocked department store — but they also carried the hardcore tabletop stuff too. Gamer games. Napoleonic Wargames. Starfleet Battles. At the back were two whole shelves solely devoted to RPGs — not just D&D — but Traveller, Runequest, Gamma World, and several others. Before that day, I’d had no idea that role-playing games weren’t just Dungeons & Dragons, but a whole genre. I felt like I’d discovered the gamer’s version of the Library of Alexandria.

After plonking down four weeks of hard-saved allowance money on the Holmes D&D Basic Set, I went home to study The Fine Art of Dungeon Mastering (it was even described in those exact terms in the rulebook). While playing with Steve, it had just seemed like an elaborate form of storytelling, but as I read further, I learned there was actually quite a bit more to it. I needed to think about balancing the difficulty of different encounters based on how many people were playing. I needed to manage what the players and monsters could do based on diseases, time, movement speed, encumbrance, lighting, terrain features, and other obstacles. There was a whole plethora of accounting that needed to be going on (ye gods! math again!) that I hadn’t been paying any attention to while playing with Steve (though to be honest, I don’t know how much of that HE was tracking while running HIS session). Even ignoring all of that, I knew that any game session needed to be well thought out in advance. I needed a complete map of any place the player could likely end up. I needed a likely plan for how each adventure would unfold, taking into account not just the most obvious choices that my potential players were likely to take, but also alternative things they might try to do. I needed to think about how different parts of the story were interconnected. What should happen if they triggered event D before trying thing A? I started to see that a truly well-developed game structure was a web rather than a straight line or even a simple branching narrative. In short, preparing to DM even the simplest session meant I needed to do hours of work before trying to run anything for someone else.

Abandoning my initial thoughts on whipping up a whole new adventure from scratch, I turned to the scenario The Keep on the Borderlands which had been included in the box of the D&D Basic Set. Set in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk universe, Keep was worked out with almost excruciating detail (though much skimpier on the narrative aspects than what would be expected for scenarios published later). Unlike Steve’s session, the scenario was littered with non-player characters to be controlled by the Dungeon Master, i.e. me. Potentially there were dozens of characters that I’d have to voice, which brought a whole other level of complication to the experience. On top of everything else I had to do, I’d have to be an improv actor, and I’d have to remember everything I told the players. I began to appreciate that being a DM was a crushing, nearly impossible job…but still, I wanted to give it a try.

The hurdle I needed next to clear was to find someone — ideally several someones — that would be willing to let me run them through a session. My difficulty was that I had virtually no close friends, or at least not the “come over to my house for three or four hours while I run you experimentally through this weird story game thing” kinds of friends. I had geeky people I knew at school, but we never hung out off campus. I’d never even been to the house of any kid that I hadn’t gone to elementary school with, and inversely, no one was really welcome to come be at my house either. The protective bubble that my parents had so carefully erected around me in elementary school meant I had few opportunities for socialization outside of my family. There was really only one kid at all that I knew who might let me run through a session with him at his house — my longtime friend, neighbor, and first gaming partner, David Guthridge.

To be fair, I don’t think David had any real interest in D&D. Like at all. I’m not sure if he even read the Lord of the Rings, though I do know he’d read further through the Chronicles of Narnia than I had. He wasn’t really a Trekkie, but he’d probably learned enough about Star Trek via the osmosis of listening to me rave that he knew who Kirk and Spock were, and what the general gist of the show was (and a few years later we went together for at least one screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). Over the years, he tolerated a lot from me just in the name of being my good friend even when I was too intolerably weird for anyone else to put up with for any extended period of time. So, when I asked him if he’d let me DM a game of D&D for him, he gamely said he’d try whatever I wanted him to do.

For the sake of the session, I opted not to try and have everything memorized beforehand. There was simply too much for me to have to know. I treated it instead like an open book dress rehearsal, and blatantly kept the Keep on the Borderlands scenario open on the Guthridge’s dinner table. I made no attempts to hide that I had no clue what I was doing. Leading David through character creation was simple enough — he just followed my suggestions — and then we plunged on into the action. It wasn’t a particularly stellar experience for either of us. He’d make a choice, and then I’d stop everything for several minutes to flip through my reference materials to see what should happen next. Probably the best moments came when we would burst into Monty Python-inspired accents for silly conversations that veered wildly away from the plot of the game. Finally, after an hour or two of erratic gameplay and bad acting, the game came to screeching halt when David’s mother wanted us cleared off her table so that she could make dinner. It would be the last D&D game I’d try to run for quite a long time, and I wouldn’t pick up my multi-sided dice again until my junior year in high school.

SCENARIO - “The Keep on the Borderlands,” written by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax, was the second module to be included in the D&D Basic Set, and was introduced in December of 1979 to replace the previous module, “In Search of the Unknown” by Mike Carr. Over the years, “The Keep on the Borderlands” became one of the most played early D&D modules of all time, and a revamped and updated version of it, retitled “Heroes of the Borderlands” is now included with the D&D 5.5 Starter Set.

Hidden behind his Dungeon Master screen, I can only see the top of James Day’s head and he leans down to consult his map. After a tense moment, he looks up and consults those of us collected around the table.

“So, have you decided what you’re going to do?”

We all exchange grim-faced scowls. Nick Luedtke announces the party’s decision. “Use the gnome.”

“Damn it!” Steven Chesbro is up on his feet, objecting to the abuse of his character, but the rest of us have voted for this. The little chaotic evil bastard has tried robbing us once too often during this session, and we’ve figured we can at least put the little larcenous prick to good use. It’s a shame his character isn’t a dwarf because they’ve got thicker skulls, and less likely to die in the process of being used as a battering ram.

From his place on the sofa in the living room a few feet away Marty — Nick’s dad — shouts out a question about his character versus Nick’s. Nick does a fast consultation and tells Marty that his character, a Half-Orc, has a better strength bonus at the moment. Nick should be the one doing the battering with Steven. James nods sagely, and begins trying to calculate what the appropriate roll should be for gnome skull versus door.

“I’m tellin’ ya, don’t do this,” Steven warns the rest of us, but we’re all rolling our eyes. It’s still too early in the day to be at this stage. Usually this sort of thing happens much later, around dinner time, when we’re all starting to get a little punch drunk from playing all day. But it’s barely half noon and we’ve only been playing for about an hour. Behind his screen, James is mumbling, looking for the appropriate table. It sounds a bit like an incantation.

Claudia, Nick’s younger sister, bounces in from the back of the house and asks if she can get anything from the fridge from us. She’s not officially part of the gaming group, but she often cheerfully plays hostess on the days that the Luedtke family lets us invade their dining room. She goes around the table as we all call out our drink orders. “Pepsi!” “Pepsi.” “Water for me.” “Mountain Dew!” “Pep-”

“HASTUR! HASTUR! HASTUR!” Steven is bellowing, wild-eyed, MANIACAL. He’s pointedly turning his insane smile around at the rest of us. Virtually all of us sag with a groan, with the exception of Franklin Oaks who throws back his head and laughs along with Steven, even though his character’s just as likely to pay for this idiocy along with the rest of the party.

I look at James and shake my head. “Don’t do it, man.”

James shrugs. “I have to. He said the name of He Who Shall Not Be Named. It’s in the Deities and Demi-Gods Manual.”

“Don’t!” As one, the rest of us lean over the table and crowd James. “Doooooooooon’t dooooooo it!” but James is already rolling for the check. For a breathless moment we all watch as the dice bounce, bounce, bounce —

And thankfully, we’re all safe. He Who Should Not Be Named has not heard, or he is choosing not to respond to Steve’s summons. Even before Steve can say anything else, Nick commands, “We stuff a rag in his mouth!” and that’s the end of the issue for the moment.

With the danger passed, the rest of us declare a bathroom break and heave up from the table, with a few of us heading down the hall to form a queue. I stay put and turn my attention to Ron Bolinger, the quietest and newest member of our D&D group. He’s got large dark eyes, and he’s somewhat nervously glancing around the room. I think he’s trying to get used to this, to this madhouse of a group. Like the rest of us, he’s a member of the Charles Page High School marching band, and a damned good trumpet player, but he’s by far the most introverted among us. “So, what do you think of all this?” I ask him.

“It’s all right,” he replies. There’s flicker of a non-committal smile on his face, and then it’s just as quickly gone.

I don’t know Ron well enough yet to know if he’s actually okay with being here, or if he’s politely trying not to show us that he’s bored out of his mind. I think the main reason he’s here is because Paul Fritts and I both invited him, and he probably figures he at least has a couple of friends here that he at least kind of knows. He’s transitioning back to living in Oklahoma after being away in California for a few years. Within the next few months, Ron will actually become one of my closest friends, and much later on, he’ll be the person I recommend New World Computing hire to take over the writing on the game that will become Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra.

In a corner next to the dining room window, Paul is keeping watch over Ron and I both. He’s smiling from ear to ear, and as far as I can tell, this is his expression every waking moment, seven days a week. He’s got short, curly blonde hair, brown eyes and looks positively cherubic. He’s a deeply charismatic born-again Christian, and over the past couple of years that we’ve been marching in the drum line together, we’ve had an almost daily ongoing religious debate. He’s taken my arguments in good natured stride, and truthfully, I think he enjoys it as much as I do. Still, I can’t quite comprehend how he’s willfully hanging around with the rest of this heathenish group. James, our DM, is aggressively an atheist, and isn’t shy about calling people idiots if they profess a belief in the Christian God, or in any kind of god for that matter. But Paul will remain steadfast in his faith, just like the many Paladin characters he always plays. In many years to come, I’ll ring Paul up to officiate my wedding, much to his eternal amusement. His first reply will be, “I always knew that one day you’d come crawling to me.”

On the way back from the bathroom, Franklin is quizzing James about whether a certain female non-player character might be hiding behind the door that we’re about to bash down with Steven’s gnome. All of our group members sigh. Franklin refuses to learn. We remind him about the last time his character went skirt chasing. His would-be paramour turned out to be a succubus, claimed his soul, then dragged him off to the hell dimension never to be seen again. We remind him of the many signs and warnings that James laid out for him. Nonetheless, Franklin is undeterred. He believes the next woman we meet will finally be the one.

It’s funny to think that I’m sitting here partially because of that first meet up with James on my first day of school at Central Junior High. He’s much more outspoken than he was on that day I found him reading Spock Must Die!, but I can appreciate that you can’t be a Dungeon Master if you’re a complete introvert. A DM’s job is to run the show, make the big calls, to decide who lives and who dies. They need to know the rules and do their best to enforce them for everyone in the group — which again is hysterical given that James is probably the person at the table who cares the least about rules out in the real world, particularly social ones. He stridently challenges our teachers in school on a regular basis, particularly when he thinks he’s caught them out in a logical or factual error. I think our chemistry and physics teachers must probably hate every time he walks through the doors of their classrooms. He’s the inverted living embodiment of the old aphorism: he’d rather be right than happy any day (though usually he thinks he’s both). That can be a problem when there are situations or ideas where there are no concrete answers, but here at the gaming table with a stack of manuals by his side, it’s his strength. It’s possible to memorize the answers, to know the truth — or at least as regards the rules of D&D. I envy his ability to keep it all in that great noggin of his.

As you might expect, James has a very different style as a Dungeon Master than my friend Steve Garrett. Steve was all about the storytelling and the adventure. If we’d played any further games together, I expect our sessions might have been filled with characters and lots of things going on in cities and taverns. With James though, he takes the name of the game seriously. It seems we’re always in dungeons and there’s always a dragon somewhere at the end of it. His worlds are murder hobo paradise. It makes sense that he’d gravitate to that approach because the combat rules are the ones that are the most defined in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons — that’s the version of the game we’ve been playing. 1st edition. Old skool, skin-of-the-teeth, how-did-anyone-survive role-playing. I came to appreciate that both approaches to the game were equally valid, but it all boiled down to individual interpretation. The game was a synthesis between the rules, the DM, and the behaviors of the players.

I have to give James credit for having pulled together an almost perfect D&D group. We were such a terrific mix of complementary player personalities, but all gonzo in our own ways. Every session turned out like the one I described above. I’m not sure what Gygax and Arneson had in mind to start, but we were less like the Seven Samurai and more like a Monty Python improv troop who have mistakenly been chosen to save the world. From a gameplay standpoint though, we had all the most important player classes covered. I got my first real sense of the interdependence of classes in James’ group, how games with multiple characters allow players to pursue their own tastes in play. I’d understood from chess how different chess pieces supported one another, but in D&D the interrelationships allowed some strategies to emerge that simply couldn’t exist without class interdependences. Subversively, it’s a great demonstration of power through diversity. We can do more when we combine our different abilities.

James’ D&D group would hang together until a year or two after high school when we all began to drift off to college, or to job opportunities in other states, or into relationships where weekends were reserved for spouses and children. Nevertheless, those were some of the best days of my life. They served as a laboratory where some of my earliest observations about game design began to take shape. Above all, it gave me a deep respect for the tabletop games that informed my future career.

WHAT’S YOUR THAC0, THIFUL? - I spent more time playing with 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons than any other. When I think back on my experiences with James, this is the image that invariably pops into my head. I always imagined this as a representation of my elf wizard Thiful whom I repeatedly resurrected, reincarnated, and returned as distant third cousins namesakes player characters. Later on, I paid honor to him by making him the never-seen author of Thiful’s Bird Migrations, one of the most useful skill boosting items in Betrayal at Krondor.

#RPG #DungeonAndDragons #DND #GameDevelopment #GameDev #AdvancedDungeonsANDDragons #ADD #GroceryMan #Stilwell

This was originally created as a Facebook “Note” — a blogging feature that was discontinued a few years back, but thankfully I’ve been able to retrieve the text of it. I’m sharing it here and now with you because his house — and his place in my life — are closely intertwined with the next entry in my From Gamer to GameDev series.

“JUST CALL ME J.L.” - My grandparents never gave my Uncle J.L. an actual name, but simply called him by the initials J.L.. Once he enlisted to fight in World War II, the Army required that he have an actual name so he was dubbed Jessie Leroy, but after leaving the service he went back to plain ole J.L..

On this day when my family is saying goodbye to my Uncle J.L. and I'm trying to think of stories to tell about him, I realize that most of them aren't really stories about MY experiences with him, but well-traveled, dog-eared, hand-me-down tales from others. We didn't really have any wild and crazy adventures together, but he had a number with my dad -- which were far better told in my father's collection of stories. My brother Gene and cousin David Dotson were lucky enough to take several cross-country trips with J.L. back before he settled down with my Aunt Marianna. Many of my first impressions about what was "out there" in America were based on the things they talked about, and the stacks of Kodachrome slides they brought back from their explorations. I still marvel that my uncle could have chosen almost anyone to take on his expeditions of discovery, but he decided instead to take his teenaged numbskull nephews. For him, that's what family was about. (I have no doubt that this in part is what inspired my brother Gene to drag his sixteen-year-old brother along on his first intercontinental adventure to Europe, but that's an epic story better told in on its own and at another time.)

Mostly what I remember about J.L. is just being at home with him and listening and talking with him (we Hallfords do a lot of that). First, at the house he shared with my Grandmother Hallford. Later on, after my grandmother passed away, J.L. married my Aunt Marianna, and they had a house built on the other side of the sprawling metropolis of Stilwell — nearly a whole mile away.

Before seeing J.L. and Marianna's place, I don't think I'd ever even set foot in a brand-new house that belonged to someone. Everyone I knew lived in houses that were at least decades old, if not half a century or more. But J.L.'s house was like a palace. Brand new carpets, brand new furniture, brand new everything as far as my young eyes could tell. But there was one feature to this new house in particular that stuck with me, something completely unlike anything I'd ever seen, and something that left such a strong impression on me that I'm sure it helped set the course for my future.

At the back of J.L.s house, tucked behind the laundry room and opposite the guest bathroom was a single, private door that was usually closed. Normally guests didn't have any cause to go back there since we did all the visitin' in the living room, but when I was invited to go through that door for the first time — I won't lie, it was like hearing a choir of angels singing the Hallelujah chorus.

Inside was a room whose walls were completely lined from floor to ceiling with books. The shelves practically groaned with titles on every topic — religion, philosophy, history, genealogy, science, geography — it was absolutely astonishing to me. I'd spent more than my fair share of time as a child haunting public libraries, but I'd never seen a collection like this in a private home. If the books hadn't been enough to give away the real purpose of the room, then the careful, altar-like arrangement of the desk at the far window and the electric typewriter that sat humming like a waiting steed erased all doubt. This was his room for writing, his inner sanctum. To stand inside that room was to stand inside his mind, and browsing those shelves you could page through the many eclectic ideas that shaped and possessed his thoughts. Certainly, all of his learning hadn't just come from those books -- he'd traipsed the world during World War II, and then later trekked across America with my brother and cousin, but it was in here where he put everything down, where he pulled it all together. In this room. At that desk. On that typewriter. To my eyes, this was everything that I'd ever imagined that a writer's room should look like.

THE MIGHTY IBM SELECTRIC III - In 2021, years after i wrote the rest of this tribute to J.L. I bought an old IBM Selectric III typewriter. It was in part a tribute both to the typewriter in J.L.’s home office, and also to an identical model that sat in my father’s office at Charles Page High School upon which I composed several of my earliest short stories.

Of course as I read over all of this, it sounds more like an essay on his house more than about J.L. himself. I'm fretting because I don't have a story like my father's about the time J.L. had had the brilliant idea of transporting a sick calf with a school bus (not a good idea), or Gene and David having all kinds of adventures with J.L. that they probably don’t want aired in public. But when I was with him, I heard all those stories, and that's what our relationship was about. Stories about the places he'd been, his deep thoughts on life, on God, and above all his family. And all those stories seeped into the brick and mortar of that house that J.L. built, and that's why when I think of J.L. I think about that house. It reflected so much of who he was, and it was filled with the living embodiment of all those stories he told.

In so many ways I am a product of The House That J.L. Built, and I will always be thankful to have had it as my home away from home. Goodbye and thank you, Uncle J.L.. I hope the next time we meet that I'll have a few good tales to tell to you.

#Stilwell #Oklahoma #Family #Hallford #Writer #Library

I haven’t really had the mental bandwidth to work on the core systems (as that takes extended periods of time dedicated to doing nothing else), so I’ve been working instead on creating more 3D assets needed for the first level of the game. One of them is not only the most important item in the level, but it’s pretty much the most important object in the entire game. Virtually all of the major quests — and most of the primary narrative elements — are all directly tied to it.

If you aren’t familiar with the original Planet’s Edge — and I’m going to continue to assume that’s most of you — the Centauri Drive is the big MacGuffin. It’s the thing that gets you into the action in the first place, and the thing you spend most of the game trying to reassemble in order to rescue the people of Earth from a dimensional trap that it’s been enveloped in. I could go on and give you a really lengthy description of the original game, but all you really need to know right now is that it’s a big deal.

I WANT A MACGUFFIN COMBO PLEASE - The original Centauri Drive, as it appeared in the original game. In this image, the N.I.C.T.U. and Harmonic Resonator have yet to be retrieved.

Several months back, I created a rough, untextured version of the Centauri Drive based the iconic profile from the original. It’s one of the very few objects from Planet’s Edge that was depicted in a large enough way that I could take at least a reasonable stab at reproducing it.

Before I could drop my adapted version down on a map, however, I needed to spend some time thinking about how it should be textured. I wanted to convey visually that this was not a purpose-built piece of technology assembled all at once, but rather a device cobbled together from pre-existing parts. It is, after all, composed from eight different components that the player has to crisscross the map trying to find. Unlike the common RPG trope of The Great Item That Was Split Up Into Pieces And Scattered Across The Kingdom For Some Damn Reason Or Another, these parts have never been together. They were never meant to be together…which in itself tells the player at least a little bit of a story. Maybe it’s not a great surprise therefore that this jury-rigged device malfunctioned and created the dimensional rift which has imprisoned the Earth. Or maybe the accident wasn’t an accident after all. Maybe the original device did exactly what had been intended by its creator all along. Is it possible that our heroes aboard the Ulysses didn’t find out the truth, or at least not the whole truth…but I digress. That’s a whole discussion for another time. Suffice to say, the truth is still out there.

FORM FOLLOWING FUNCTION - All in all, I’ve been fairly faithful to the original design, but I’ve made a few modifications along the way. (I hope you’ll forgive me if I opted for a less garish paint job in the final design.) The above represents my first pass at the basic geometry for the Centauri Drive in Blender, but I’ve since tweaked a few of the finer details to provide more visual interest for the final model.

I would love to tell you that when I wrote the story for the original game, I spent a lot of time working out the elaborate back stories of each of these components. That would be lovely to say…but it didn’t happen that way. Back then, all the story served the Centauri Drive itself, with the component pieces being little more than interchangeable widgets. Each was simply the payoff at the end of an extended quest chain, and they could have been anything. I just have easily could have told the player to go get a wheel spanner, a coffee filter, the hubcab off a ‘73 Buick, Marsha Brady’s retainer, the third volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, twelve bat wings, the tears of an unloved toy, and your Great Aunt Phylis’ dearly beloved photo of Millard Fillmore (signed by the great man himself). With the possible exception of the K-Beam, they were each rather inconsequential items to the worlds from which they were taken. I intend, with Fractured Frontiers, to give each of these components stories of their own that are more connected to the places where they are found.

DRIVING UNDER THE INFLUENCES - From a visual perspective, no self-respecting industrial designer would mash together all these different colors, textures and styles, but the disunity hints at the Centauri Drive’s chaotic creation. At a more meta level, this drive column reflects the numerous influences of classic sci-fi television shows and movies on both the original game and Fractured Frontier. Can you spot the visual references?

Once I got done with the texturing job, I had so much fun spinning the object around in Blender’s preview window that I thought I’d create the little in-universe “explainer” video that you see at the top of this post. Some version of it may or may not end up in the final game, but in the meantime, you get a little nibble more about what I’m working on. It also gave me the excuse to create a new piece of ambient music that will most definitely end up in the game as well. This one is entitled Accessing the Archive.

Until next time, Edgarians. (I promise, we’ll get this officially worked out. Eventually).

#games #blender #3d #scifi #NarrativeDesign #indiedev #gamedev #video #composer

RYLAN BURSAR: Return the money, Centauri.
CENTAURI: Return the money? Are you delirious? Do you know how long it took to invent the games? To merchandise them? To get them in the stores by Christmas?
GRIG: It must be terribly embarrassing for you, and I do sympathize. However...
CENTAURI: But I saw him fight! He could be the greatest Starfighter ever!
ALEX ROGAN: That was just a game, Centauri.
CENTAURI: A game? You may have thought it was a game, but it was also a test. Aha! A test! Sent out across the universe to find those with the gift to be Starfighters. And here you are, my boy. Here you are!

— From The Last Starfighter (1984)

When I trudged into the Salvation Army community center in the fall of 1978, I wasn’t there for fun. My doctor had determined I was a bit too husky — which was the polite, seventies way of saying I was a fat ass — and I needed to get more exercise. Thanks to the asthma that had dogged me through elementary school, my options were limited. Too much exertion and I could land for the millionth time in the emergency room, jacked full of needles and adrenaline to keep my airways open. (Not a fun time. Do not recommend. Zero stars.) Most traditional sports were out of the question for me, and although I was in marching band, the doctor wanted me to have a physical activity that I could do on my own schedule, and at my own pace. Preferably something I enjoyed doing so that I’d keep at it. I thought maybe I could try swimming at the Salvation Army community center they’d recently opened across the Arkansas River in Prattville. So when my mother at last dragged me through the front doors, my only expectations were that I’d do a few thousand laps around the pool until all the ugly melted off me and at last I’d look like a shorter, brown-haired version of Aquaman (the Superfriends version, not the Jason Momoa one that rendered such aspirations unobtainable for we mere mortals). What I had not expected was to clap eyes on a strange, high-tech artifact in the community center lobby that would prefigure my future career. What I saw was an arcade game.

Now for my readers who are Gen Zers or even millennials, I need to explain that until that moment, I had never seen a video game of any kind, let alone an arcade game. Sure, I’d witnessed Chewie and C-3PIO playing some kind of weirdo pre-cursor of Battle Chess in Star Wars the year before, but that had been a faked simulation, and it bore no resemblance to the mysterious cabinet that was calling so seductively to me from across the room.

The game I’d discovered was called Space Wars, and it featured a hero ship that looked suspiciously identical to Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise (without having any other identifying marks that could have got the makers sued by Paramount). In this era before joysticks became omnipresent, everything was controlled with a simple bank of square buttons arrayed beneath the screen. In design, it was no-frills and completely simple, but to me it played right into my fantasies of being the captain of my favorite starship and I instantly became a hundred percent addicted to it.

One of the oddest things about playing that first arcade game was how quickly I figured it out. It’s not like I had any direct previous experiences to compare it with. It was vaguely like driving a radio-controlled car, but significantly much more complex in functionality since you’re not just steering it but controlling thrust, controlling rotation, firing torpedoes, avoiding enemy shots and all the while dealing with the effects of gravity and inertia. It was a significant step up cognitively, and yet I took to it almost instantly. That’s not to say I became any kind of bigshot wizard with it. I never had enough quarters or time to get really good at it since I was supposed to be spending my time at the community center in the pool and not parked in front of the machine. Nonetheless, it became the primary reason I wanted to come back every week.

Another really interesting aspect of Space Wars was that the players not only had the power to change the game’s difficulty, but also the game’s environment. You could decide whether the player’s ship and missiles bounced off the edges of the map, or whether they wrapped around. You could create a black hole in the center of the map that would suck in and destroy anything that got too close, or create an anti-gravity star that deflected anything passing through the center region of the map. It was an entirely unique feature that to the best of my knowledge would not be seen in any other arcade game ever again, or at least not in such an obvious form.

Space Wars would go on to become one of the most influential early arcade games, and was the first coin-op machine to ever use a vector graphics system. It was so revolutionary that Atari — rather brazenly — directly lifted the look and several of Space Wars’ core features for Asteroids which they released in 1979. Cinematronics responded by hitting Atari with a lawsuit claiming patent infringement, but the results of the suit did nothing to stop Asteroids from going on to phenomenal success. Within a few years, several legendary games like Star Castle, Tempest, Battle Zone, Lunar Lander — and even 1983’s hits Star Wars and Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator — would all use the same vector graphics system pioneered with Space Wars.

The lessons that I would take away for my future career were twofold. Firstly, when thinking back on it during my early days in the gaming industry, I remember feeling that I’d been just a tiny bit more invested in Space Wars than I’d been with any of the other arcade games that I played thereafter. Initially, I assumed it was because it had been my first arcade game. That certainly had to be part of why I liked it a bit more. First experiences, first loves — those things get under our skins and color our perceptions in a way that other things don’t. But the more that I thought about it, I realized there’d been real power in getting a little taste of control over the game environment, even though it was just allowing me to tweak a couple of basic rules. By letting me control just those couple of things, I was no longer just a player, but a collaborator in the experience which also gave me the tiniest sense of ownership.

My second lesson had to do with experiential learning. I hadn’t needed to spend twenty minutes running through tutorials or reading a rule book before I could start playing. Even with relatively simple traditional board games like Clue and Monopoly, you still had to spend at least a few minutes beforehand plowing through instructions. But with Space Wars, once I’d dropped in my quarter and hit the start button, I was in the game. I learned how to play the game…by playing in the game. When I did things wrong, I blew up. When I did things right, I scored points. Although the games that I would go on to develop would be much, much more complex and have rulesets that were much more abstracted, I always found myself going back philosophically to that first experience with Space Wars. I have always tried to create games that let players jump in as quickly as possible before bogging them down with blind decisions and hours of character class research that’s meaningless until the player’s actually had the opportunity to see how things work in the game. To this day, I am a strong believer in teaching players what they need to do and introducing features progressively, as needed, as the player moves forward into the experience.

PEW, PEW, PEW! - Created in 1977 by Cinematronics, Space Wars became the best-selling arcade game of 1978, moving over 10,000 machines in its first year on the market. It was based on the PDP-1 computer game Spacewar! created by J. Martin Graetz, Wayne Witanen, and Stephen R. Russell who first demonstrated it at MIT’s May Open House in 1962.

The problem I had as a teenager with developing a habit for Space Wars — and all the other arcade games that followed soon after — was that I always needed money. If I’d been like a lot of other kids my age, I might have been allowed to get a part time job, but my parents didn’t want me to be distracted from my schoolwork and forbade me from entering the work force until I was at least sixteen. And thus, the dollars’ worth of quarters that my mother parceled out to me as reward for doing pool laps turned into a kind of sad Pavlovian exercise. Do my laps, get my quarters, get my momentary fix of electronic glory. To this day, I can’t look at a pool or smell chlorine without thinking about blasting aliens in Space Wars.

Unsurprisingly, over the next year as the pounds did not just fall off my frame, and since I couldn’t make as many trips to the community center when I was busy with my classes, I grew frustrated with the whole grind. I wanted to be able to play games without always having to perform for quarters, but the most obvious solution for my problem was something that was well outside of my reach. The first home gaming console — the Atari Video Computer System (later rebranded as the Atari 2600) — had debuted for $200 which would have been the equivalent of about $900 in today’s money — far outside of what I could reach with my $3 a week allowance, and there was no way I could have convinced my parents to drop that kind of money for something so frivolous. (You can’t imagine how envious I felt when, a year later, I found an Atari 2600 in the bedroom of my cousin Mark Bovis).

DREAM MACHINE - The Atari 2600 was the first commercially successful home gaming console, and played a major role in turning Gen Xers like myself into the first true gamer generation. I remember a lot of hours playing Pong, Break Out, Missile Command, Space Invaders and many others on my cousins’ machine. I wouldn’t own a dedicated gaming console of my own until 1992 after I’d started working at Dynamix. As one of my first purchases after moving to Eugene, I bought a Sega Genesis.

While a fancy game console wasn’t in the cards for me, I’d become fascinated by a little toy that seemed to be everywhere after I’d discovered Space Wars. It was a small, handheld, beige-colored gadget that had become the bane of every teacher at Central Junior High. While our instructors were trying to teach us about important things like math, and chemistry, and that batshit crazy Oklahoma governor that declared war on Texas that one time, it seemed like there was always someone in the back of the classroom with one of these devices beeping and booping and generally interrupting lectures. Easily, these doohickeys became the #1 most confiscated objects on campus. And so, many years before tamagotchis and cell phones arrived, Mattel Handheld Football ushered in the age of mobile distraction.

In truth, I wasn’t initially as enamored with these gadgets as I could have been because they were supposed to be emulations of sports games, and I was a card-carrying member of the I Hate All Sportsball Club. Why would I want to play an electronic version of a game that I didn’t like in real life? But the absurdity of the situation was that if you removed the label, and you got rid of the simulated grid of the football field, and the molded plastic around the screen that suggested a football stadium, there wasn’t really much there. All the players and the ball were just represented by the same red LEDs. They just as well could have represented chess pieces, or spaceships, or orcs, or a field filled by Sponge Bob SquarePants and his friends. I thought about how much emotional investment that a player can make in a token if it’s framed with a specific fantasy. If you tell me the red dot is a quarterback, I don’t care what happens to it. If you tell me the red dot is the Enterprise, then suddenly I care a great deal about it getting safely across the quadrant. The narrative context can make all the difference between engagement and apathy.

For Christmas of 1979, I didn’t find a Space Wars arcade machine sitting next to our Christmas tree. I also didn’t find any version of an Atari game console connected up to our television set. But what I did find was a hardback sized package that contained an electronic handheld game called Space Battle. Like Mattel Handheld Football, all of the action was handled with little red LEDs, but in this version, spaceships were exchanging torpedo fire across the screen rather than football players tossing around pigskins. It was incredibly simple and super cheap, but it was the first electronic game I’d ever own.

MISSLES AWAY! - Produced by Entex in Taiwan, Space Battle was released in 1979.

#Games #GameDesign #GameHistory #RetroGames #SpaceWars #Atari #Entex #Mattel #Cinematronics #VectorGraphics