Live Magazine February Issue February 2014 | Page 30

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writers or say artists, home makers,
hobbyists, there was none of that.
It was pretty much an engineering
machine.

content when it was released?
Well you know, it was a different
time. There weren’t many home
computers and the ones that ex-

IBM 16 Junior or on a computer that
had an EGA graphics card and at that
time when the game originally came
out, EGA graphics cards cost $600!

Remember it was DOS based so, if
you had trouble altering your config.sys file or rewriting your autoexec.bat file or any of those sorts
of things, you had to be a puzzle
solver to get the damn machines to
work and so therefore, adventure
games were the perfect medium for
that period. Consequently, we got
very few complaints from people
about the games. There were a few
later on that said ‘oh, police questions drinking prostitute and then
have sex’ but the complaints were

“IF YOU CAN WATCH AN R RATED MOVIE, IF YOU CAN BUY A NOVEL AND
READ THE NOVEL ABOUT EXPLICIT SEX, THEN WHY CAN’T YOU INTERACT
WITH IT IN A GAME?”
isted couldn’t play the game. It was
the rare machine that had enough
graphics power and by machine, I
mean PC. The rare IBM PC had the
ability to play the game and later on
I realised after talking with people,
that most people played the game
in black and white as that’s all they
had. They had a green screen monitor - you know, green and black pixels which was horrible , I’m not sure
how they watched that (laughs). The
only place that 16 colours was on an

Just the card itself with like 16kb of
memory or something, there weren’t
many of those around. So it wasn’t
a big deal. Now as the games went
along as the years passed, more
and more computers, more and
more PC’s got the ability to render
the games and therefore more people saw them. But yeah, when it first
came out, there wasn’t much. The
people that did see it were mostly
the people that had home PC’s and
were engineers, scientists. Very few

so few. And remember, there was
no internet or email. People actually had to get out a pen and paper and a stamp, an envelope and
walk to the mail box and stuff and it
was a hell of a lot of trouble to do.
It wasn’t the same as ‘hey, I’ll just
leave a comment here’ and click
and type and show your stupidity.
Yeah, that’s one unfortunate side
effect of the worlds connectivity
now.