Comment by chr15m
10 hours ago
Conan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.
I grew up with an Aplle IIc and I loved Conan the Barbarian. A neighbor made me a copy and I used to absolutely love playing that game. I remember there was a message on the screen when you died, and the one burnt in my mind is "The eyes have it". I also loved Prince of Persian for the 486. That one I actually beat. Your history is very similar to mine. Now, I have been coding for decades, but it all started on the Apple IIc.
Happy days. I think Prince of Persia is one of the only games I beat.
Did you ever play Another World by Erich Chahi? Still one of the greatest games and still good today.
Oh hell yeah. My neighbor had that for his commodore 64. I never owned that one, but I was blown away by its graphics and how smooth the animations were. I have not thought about that game in a really long time. Good times! I also loved text based adventures. Like probably lots of kids in the early 80s, one of the first ones I played was Adventure. I also loved The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Infocom was awesome. I have been playing through the zork series with my 14 year old recently.
One other game I absolutely loved for the Apple II was Captain Goodnight. I got really far into that game, but I don't think I ever beat it.
1 reply →
I've never heard it mentioned, but I think Another World was visually influenced by another French project, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartakus_and_the_Sun_Beneath_...
That sounds like my childhood and teen years. It feels so far away culturally. I miss the sub culture and counter culture.
It's not coming back either.
At the same time: a Raspberry Pi 2 W has more CPU power than all of the machines that I had between 1980 and 1991. The experience is still there. But it is very difficult to take a child from say 'Minecraft' to a blinking cursor on the screen and get them to be interested.
Below the Root was a fantastic game, I somehow stumbled upon that 40+ years ago on my PC and played it not understanding what the rules were. Now I’m going to have to look for it as abandonware.
I just produced a restoration/translation of Below The Root last month! Check it out, hope it brings back some memories: https://root.saul.pw.
I had a pirated copy of Below The Root as a kid on my Apple IIc... except the small town copy network had made a bad copy. So it'd only play some of the time if i was lucky. I'm going to dive into this