An excerpt appeared in the print version of Stanford.
First video game experience:
“I cannot recall my first video game. Certainly I played Pong when it came out, so since that’s often considered the first video game I guess it was my first as well. Even Adventure is not truly a ‘video game,’ and I’m not sure what that term includes. For instance, what about John Horton Conway’s Game of Life (the cellular automata simulation), which appeared in several of Martin Gardner’s columns in Scientific American? I wrote my own programs for it that printed each ‘turn’ on paper, but I did also see and use programs that displayed the game on early video screens.
It’s all part of a spectrum of games played on computers, and I’ve been playing those since the early ’60s. Though I’m sure there were trivial games such as tic-tac-toe, the first computer game I recall encountering was a text-only golf game. One chose clubs, but there was no aiming or timing or other dexterity-based element; each club went a certain average distance, and the game added a random element to both the distance and the angle based on some questions the player answered at the start, including handicap and biggest golf problem (hook, slice, poor distance, etc). The game was written in BASIC and I rewrote it in Fortran as a way of learning the latter language.”
Favorite video game:
“I actually haven't played all that many. I guess in terms of amount of time frittered away, my favorite time-sink was Heroes of Might & Magic II, but again that’s largely because I know I’m easily addicted to such things so I’ve avoided getting sucked into them too often!
If you include multiplayer online games, then my favorite has to be EverQuest, which I started playing in 2003 when I was between jobs and was considering teaming up with some like-minded friends to start Yet Another MMORPG [massively multiplayer online role playing game] company. I’d never played any of them so someone let me try out EQ to get an idea what they’re like. Did I mention I’m easily addicted? I play several other MMORPGs now—Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic—but EQ is still my favorite.
As for why? I could say it’s because I’ve spent thousands of hours playing EQ (and hundreds playing HoMM2), but that just begs the question, because I don’t really know what it is that grabs me about certain games. The same is true for non-computer games: There are board games and card games that I’ve played thousands of times, but I’d be hard pressed to say why I find those games in particular to be so replayable.”
Stanford video game memory:
“I discovered my passion for games long before college. The main Stanford-centric gaming event for me was being introduced to Adventure, when fellow student John Gilbert [PhD ’81] discovered it on the SUMEX machine at the medical center, and the subsequent development of the game as I made it available to other sites via Stanford’s connection with the ARPAnet.
The one ‘aha moment’ anecdote I associate with Stanford was when Zork was being developed by a group of MIT students, and I was playing it over the net (many sites were pretty laid back about access in those more innocent times), and from my score I could tell I’d solved all of it except for one particular puzzle. After a long night playing Zork at the old Stanford AI Lab (the one out in the hills, aka D. C. Power Lab), I was driving home and suddenly realized what to do to solve that last puzzle. The next day I went back to the lab and fired up Zork and discovered the authors had added another whole section it. I decided I was never going to reach the endgame and stopped playing it!”
