A glimpse into gaming history

Over the last few weeks, I've been going through the extensive series of posts by The Digital Antiquarian, who has written a history of computer games dating back to 1966, with a particular focus on interactive fiction games of the sort popularized by Infocom. The author, an American living in Denmark, is intelligent and often does an excellent job researching his subjects through a variety of sources, and makes very good use of the industry magazines of the time. It's a rich resource for game designers and players interested in the history of computer games, especially thanks to the way he has provided ebooks containing all of his posts devoted to the games and technologies being introduced that year. He even attempts to write personal histories of some of the more important figures of the era, such as Richard Garriot and Sid Meier.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend the site without reservations, because TDA repeatedly makes two fundamental mistakes that no historian should ever make. First, he doesn't hesitate to demonstrate his own temporal bias, loftily dismissing the attitudes and social mores of previous times and criticizing both games and people on the basis of his current SJW standards. It's particularly annoying that he insists on ungrammatically and unrealistically substituting "her" for "he" as the standard third person singular subject when describing situations in which the latter was statistically far more appropriate. Consider the example of her - see how misleading and annoying that is, Jimmy - example of the multicolor character mode of the Commodore 64:

In its default mode, the 64 subdivides its screen into a grid of character cells, each 8 X 8 pixels. Thus there are 40 of them across and 25 down, corresponding to the machine’s standard text display. Elsewhere in memory are a set of up to 256 tiles that can be copied into these cells. A default set, containing the glyph for each letter, number, and mark of punctuation in addition to symbols and simple line-drawing figures, lives in ROM. The programmer can, however, swap this set out for her own set of tiles. This system is conceptually the same as the tile-graphics system which Richard Garriott used in the Ultima games, but these tiles are smaller (only the size of a single character) and monochrome, just a set of bits in which 1 represents a pixel in the foreground color, 0 a pixel in the background color. The latter color is set globally, for the whole screen. The former is specified individually for each cell, via a table stored elsewhere in memory.

So, let’s look at what all this means in terms of memory. Each cell on the screen consumes one byte, representing the number (0 to 255) of the tile that is placed there. There are 1000 character cells on a 40 X 25 display, so that’s about 1 K consumed. We need 8 bytes to store each tile as an 8 X 8 grid of on-off pixels. If we use all 256, that’s 2 K. Finally, the color table with the foreground color for each cell fills another 1 K. We’ve just reduced 32 K to 4 K, or just 2 K if we use the default set of character glyphs in ROM. Not bad. Of course, we’ve also introduced a lot of limitations. We now have to build our display, jigsaw-puzzle style, from our collection of tiles. And each cell can only use two of our total of 16 colors, one of which can be unique to that cell but the other of which must be the same for the entire screen. For someone wishing to make a colorful game, this last restriction in particular may just be too much to accept.

Enter multicolor character mode. Here, we tell the 64 that we want each tile to be not monochrome but drawn in four colors. Rather than using one bit per pixel within the tile, we now use two, which allows us to represent any number from 0 to 3. One of these colors is still set individually for each cell; the other three are set globally, for the screen as a whole. And there’s another, bigger catch: because we still only devote eight bytes to each tile, we must correspondingly reduce its resolution, and that of the screen as a whole. Each tile is now 4 X 8 (horizontally elongated) pixels, the screen as a whole 160 X 200. Even so, this is easily the most widely used mode in Commodore 64 games. It’s also the mode that Scott Nelson (little brother of Starpath co-founder Craig Nelson) chose for Summer Games‘s flag selection screen.

This is detailed and pertinent information. And were there female Commodore 64 programmers? Sure. Were there very many of them? No. It is ungrammatical, politically-biased, historically-misleading, and distracting nonsense. It's particularly jarring when, as in the example quoted above, TDA uses the female pronoun to describe the general situation while the specific example provided is almost invariably male.

But this temporal bias can be easily ignored, since no one really cares if TDA believes Ultima II is sexist or that Mikhael Gorbachev was the true hero responsible for ending the Cold War while Ronald Reagan was a stupid warmonger who just happened to be there. Opinions, right or wrong, are obviously subjective. Who is to say that a future Digital Antiquarian should not similarly lambast The Sims for failing to have covered the female characters' faces and thereby tempting the male characters to sin? Who is to say that the late, great Dan Bunton aka Danielle Bunton Berry should not be erased from gaming history along with his games if the future historian happens to disapprove of his sexual-identification choices?

Well, I, for one, most certainly do. History is what happened, not what we wish would have happened.

A more serious problem is the Digital Antiquarian's decision to play SJW history police. As a game developer since 1990, who has been personally acquainted with many of the figures mentioned on his site, and who was professionally involved in the transition from 2D to 3D graphics, I thought that he would welcome some of the historical information I possessed as a 3D technology evangelist, a nationally syndicated game reviewer, and game designer. And indeed, he was interested in the information I was willing to provide... until he consulted Wikipedia, decided that I was a criminal badthinker, and concluded that he did not wish to engage in further communications with me.

Now, let's face it, I am not a central figure in the history of computer gaming and this decision to wilfully ignore a single minor source of information for the 1992-1998 era is not exactly akin to eliminating Steve Meretzky from the history of Infocom. But the problem is this: now we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Digital Antiquarian is intrinsically biased and unreliable. Who else is he refusing to talk to, who else - and what else - is he refusing to write about? I very much doubt I am the only historical figure in the computer gaming industry of whom he does not approve. This embrace on his part of SJW history policing is particularly egregious in light of his advice for those who consider themselves to be historians in this field to "really need to be sure of your facts and careful with your words". 

I’m not the first one to reveal the true story of Escape from Mt. Drash. John Williams has occasionally tried to correct the record in the past via comments to other blog posts and the like that repeated the legend. Recently it has begun to seem that word is finally getting out. Blogger Pix had the opportunity to interact with Garriott personally last year, and asked him directly about the Mt. Drash legend. Garriott at last confirmed to him that he had known about the game and duly authorized its release.

So why should I take up the cause now? Well, there are still plenty of online sources that repeat the legend. I’d thus like to add this blog’s weight — to whatever extent it has weight — to the true story. This I partly do as a favor to John Williams, who has gifted me (and you) with so many memories and insights on the early days of Sierra and the industry as a whole. John is, understandably enough, annoyed at the persistence of this falsehood, as it directly impinges the honor of Sierra and by extension himself.

More generally — and yes, I know I rant about this more than I should — this can serve as a lesson to people who consider themselves historians in this field to be a bit more rigorous, and not to substitute easy assumptions for research. I won’t get into the original source of the false legend here, only say that I’m disappointed that it was repeated for so long without ever being seriously questioned. When you are thinking of saying something that directly accuses people of unethical dealings you really need to be sure of your facts and careful with your words. Frankly, that’s a lesson that Richard Garriott himself could learn; despite my admiration for his vision and persistence as a gaming pioneer, I find his glib dismissal of the folks at California Pacific and Sierra who launched his career as dishonest, “stupid bozoos,” and “heavy drug users” to be unconscionable. It’s a lesson his fans should also take to heart.

If you do have one of those websites that repeats the legend of Escape from Mt. Drash… hey, it happens. I’ve made a hash of things myself once or twice in public. But maybe think about taking a moment to make a correction? I’m sure that at the very least John Williams and the others who built Sierra would appreciate it.

However, there is a positive consequence to our brief and disappointing exchange. It was the Digital Antiquarian's dismissive reaction to me that led me to realize that if future generations of gamers are going to know how things actually happened and what it was really like, the histories need to be written by those of us who were actually there, not by those who weren't there, especially when they are inclined to improperly impose their values, their interpretations, and their opinions on people and events of the past.

So that is why I have decided to not only revive this blog and post old interviews with acquaintances like Johnny Wilson, Doug TenNapel, John Romero, Kurt Busch, and Chris Taylor but also begin conducting new interviews with important figures from the last 30 years.