Author Topic: Two-Part AVWW Interview On Rock, Paper, Shotgun  (Read 10703 times)

Offline Nalgas

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 680
Re: Two-Part AVWW Interview On Rock, Paper, Shotgun
« Reply #15 on: February 09, 2011, 10:14:34 pm »
Quote
Kids these days and their retro-newfangled ASCII art.  Rogue is what got me used to ASCII art

Rogue? Wasn't that created for those newfangled DEC machines running toy operating systems like RSX and eventually Unix?

REAL character-based graphics were from the EBCDIC character set printed on fanfold paper (or, if you were lucky, a 3278 terminal) from a run of the Star Trek game STRTRK on an MVS mainframe.

I'm sure I have my punched-card deck of the STRTRK source code in PL/I here somewhere.... :D

You win.  Rogue didn't even exist until ~1980, and the first computer I owned at home was a VIC-20, which I think was released the year after that.  I'm aware of and have been exposed to a bunch of the older stuff (growing up near MIT with friends whose dads did CS research there certainly helped), but a lot of it was before my time.  I will respectfully get off your lawn now.  Heh.

Offline Flatfingers

  • Newbie Mark III
  • *
  • Posts: 43
Re: Two-Part AVWW Interview On Rock, Paper, Shotgun
« Reply #16 on: February 10, 2011, 03:09:53 am »
I don't know if I'd count that as a win; I just happen to have stuck around the computer game industry since I first played Nolan Bushnell's SpaceWar port on the big red arcade box in the early '70s. It wasn't until 1981 that I had a computer of my own: a Radio Shack Color Computer with its 6809 processor running at a blazing 0.89 MHz.

The thing that amazes me when I look back is just how limited we were then. In a way, making games was easy because the technical limitations were so extreme. There was only so much you could do. Technology has come so far in 30 years that there is no basically no limit -- if you can imagine it, you can create it and share it with millions of people.

Seeing it that way, it's sort of cool that roguelikes are still popular. A fundamental concept never goes out of style; we just get more sophisticated in their presentation.

I wonder what computer games will look like 30 years from now.

I bet there'll still be versions of Rogue.

And STRTRK. :)

Offline Echo35

  • Master Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,703
  • More turrets! MORE TURRETS!
Re: Two-Part AVWW Interview On Rock, Paper, Shotgun
« Reply #17 on: February 10, 2011, 10:52:56 am »
Quote
Kids these days and their retro-newfangled ASCII art.  Rogue is what got me used to ASCII art

Rogue? Wasn't that created for those newfangled DEC machines running toy operating systems like RSX and eventually Unix?

REAL character-based graphics were from the EBCDIC character set printed on fanfold paper (or, if you were lucky, a 3278 terminal) from a run of the Star Trek game STRTRK on an MVS mainframe.

I'm sure I have my punched-card deck of the STRTRK source code in PL/I here somewhere.... :D

You win.  Rogue didn't even exist until ~1980, and the first computer I owned at home was a VIC-20, which I think was released the year after that.  I'm aware of and have been exposed to a bunch of the older stuff (growing up near MIT with friends whose dads did CS research there certainly helped), but a lot of it was before my time.  I will respectfully get off your lawn now.  Heh.

We had a Spectrum ZX at one point in time, but that was a few years before me, so I got spoiled with the awesome power of the Amiga :P

Though I never played Rogue. I did have some very old RPG's, but nothing ASCII based then. I didn't get into ASCII games until I discovered nethack in Middle school ::)

Offline Ozymandiaz

  • Hero Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 813
  • King of kings
Re: Two-Part AVWW Interview On Rock, Paper, Shotgun
« Reply #18 on: February 11, 2011, 10:01:09 am »
Very interesting interview. I love the idea of a peristent world I can get back to when I want and keep on making changes and affecting it :)
We are the architects of our own existence