Forbidden Lands is the first RPG I bought this year and I ended up with two copies: one in English … and one in Swedish. The Swedish one arrived first due to a shipping mishap. Now granted, my family is Swedish – my grandfather and grandmother came to America as teenagers – so I’ve always … Read more
Vince Hendricks was my first RPG game master. There were other game masters before him, but Vince ran the first real, ongoing, sustained campaign I played in. Vince was my first college roommate – a senior when I was a sophomore (I transferred in that year) and he introduced me to a ton of gamers … Read more
Spacewar! is the world’s second video game. Created by MIT students in 1962, it – like Tennis for Two – earned a shrine in Ready Player One. Quote The museum’s bottom level, located in the planet core, was a spherical room containing a shrine to the very first videogame, Tennis for Two, invented by William Higinbotham in 1958. The … Read more
Battlezone is a first-person tank game released by Atari in 1980. Like Star Wars Arcade, it uses vector graphics to create a three-dimensional representation of its gaming world. It helps inform the visuals of Ready Player One. Quote On the surface, Archaide looked exactly like the environment of the 1981 game Battlezone, another vector-graphic classic from Atari. In … Read more
Star Wars Aracade is a vector graphics-based video game released by Atari in 1983. Additional versions were released for home consoles (albeit with inferior graphics). The game plays a minor role in Ready Player One, serving as the inspiration for the arcade museum planet of Archaide. Quote The planet’s only surface feature was a web … Read more
Madness and the Minotaur is a text adventure game for the TRS-80 in 1981 by Spectral Associates. It plays a minor role in the book Ready Player One. Quote I knew from my research that the cassette recorder functoned as the TRS-80’s “tape drive”. It stored data as analog sound on magneetic audiotapes. When Halliday had first … Read more
Pyramid – aka Pyramid 2000 – is a clone of Colossal Cave Adventure that trades the original game’s fantasy tropes for an Egyptian-themed pyramid crawler. Radio Shack published the game in 1979 for the TRS-80. Quote I knew from my research that the cassette recorder functoned as the TRS-80’s “tape drive”. It stored data as analog sound on … Read more
Bedlam is a text adventure game released by Radio Shack for the TRS-80. Written by Robert Arnstein (Raaka-Tu, Pyramid 2000) and released in 1982, the game sets you up as a patient trying to escape an asylum. Quote I knew from my research that the cassette recorder functoned as the TRS-80’s “tape drive”. It stored … Read more
The 16th edition of Nuketown’s Sci-Fi and Fantasy Summer Reading List for 2023 features 13 books (12 novels, one non-fiction book), two novellas, and one graphic novel. While dominated by science fiction titles, it has a few horror and fantasy books too. There’s a self-help book dedicated to dealing with stress. You can track my … Read more
Raaka-tu is a text adventure game (we call it interactive fiction today) released by Radio Shack in 1981 for its TRS-80 and TRS-80 Color Computer. The game was written by Robert Arnstein. Despite playing a ton of text adventure games as a kid (such as Colossal Cave, Zork, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I never … Read more