From Gamer to GameDev: Part VII

Confessions of A Teenage Digital Hooligan

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.

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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