By Kieron Gillen on July 8th, 2009 at 8:23 pm.
Picking the handful of games that made me is somewhat tricky. Not picking the games that made me, but picking the handful. The house of my gaming past is on fire and I only get to grab what I can carry? That’s not how I think.
One of the things I tend to chew over with games is their almost utilitarian nature – the idea that games (and art generally) is there for a purpose. Moreso: that pleasure and its various shades are a purpose. As such, depending what interested me at any given time, I could do an autobiography via games, talking about why I went where, when and what that said about games and what it said about me. Something like Garry Mulholland’s lovely This Is Uncool.
So I’m narrowing it down a bit. Looking back, it interests me how many games were external things which changed everything. I spend most of my gaming time sitting inside this screen. But some of the most memorable games I found out there. I left home, went somewhere, met a game, and when I came back, I was a different person. An Adventure. There and back again…
The Hobbit (Melbourne House)
So appropriately enough, we start with this. I’ve told this story before on podcasts, but it seems I never got around to doing so on the site. Could you humour me?
When I first remember hearing about gaming, the Hobbit loomed large. It was introduced to me by my best friend. He was the youngest brother of three. I was the oldest of two. As such, he was exposed to a mass of illicit information via the elder siblings: things which appeared to me as they’d been dropped from another, more exciting world: American Comics; The less Enid Blighton strain of choose your own adventure books; Eddie the Head, the Iron Maiden Mascot who prompted intense theological arguments.
Our Catholic education left us sure that God was more powerful than the Devil. However, it was equally true that the cover of Iron Maiden’s NUMBER OF THE BEAST album proved Eddie the Head was more powerful than the Devil, because it pictured him using Satan as a marionette. So… who was strongest out of Eddie and God? It troubled us.
Anyway, relevantly, this same friend introduced me to computer games.
The idea of games in the home was alien. While not exactly technophobic, my parents always lagged behind the technological curve. My friend enlightened me about the joys I was missing, primarily on our weekly walks to the swimming pool. Every Wednesday, our school trudged the half mile to the local baths. There and back again, he told me about his latest adventures. “Oh yeah – I waited until sunrise, so the Trolls turned into stone…” “I can get in this barrel in the Elf King’s cellar, but I can’t work out a way to make them throw me in the water.” “Yeah, I don’t go that way any more… there’s spiders up there.” “Oh, I’m in the Goblin Dungeon, and there’s a trapdoor in the basement.” “Ah – I tricked the wizard and the dwarf into a cave and then locked them there.”
I listened, mouth agape. This thing he spoke of was the greatest thing in the entire history of humanity.
Time passed and I finally had a chance to go to his house and see the game. I’d say months, but I suspect with a kid’s perception of time, it was actually just a fortnight. It felt like eons. You can’t imagine my excitement at sitting there as the spectrum sang its atonal loading noise song. Christmas-morning anticipation ran through me.
The game started. A hobbit-hole door appears on the screen, in lurid green.
I glance over at my friend: “YOU NEVER TOLD ME IT WAS JUST WORDS!”
That’s how games and I got together and in that moment, there’s the future echo of our relationship. That is, joyous awareness of their infinite possibility, depression at their stunted actualities.
But it was a start. I OPEN DOORed and was away.
Kung-fu Master (Data East)
I was in the arcades before Kung-fu Master, of course. I’d have been nine by the time it came out in 1984. The arcades were the only time I saw games – or in the working men’s clubs, which was either a game of Scramble (in Cannock’s sprawling club) or something Galaxians or Phoenix shaped (the GPO around the corner). I dug them a lot. If you wanted an Us and Them moment, it’d be when a kid asked me why I was playing the game, as no money ever came out (as opposed the to the fruit machines). I was dumbfounded: pleasure comes out.
Kung-fu master was different, because it was a game I saw a lot. Being in various places, it was the introduction to the idea of games following me around. The idea that a game could be a shared social language – and bond – between complete strangers in different places. It was a shared social experience, despite being single player.
It also had awesome flying-kicks.
The small things appealed. The incredible precision of its control system. A button press and a whiplash kick with none of the slowness of most games. The size and clarity of the graphics. The plot. It seemed far more like a real place – more immersive – than anything I’d played before. I’d realised that visual representation alone wasn’t enough when I burnt through 50p coins with Dragon’s Lair the year before. It was the right kind of visual representation. It was a game which made me jump around the room like an idiot. Pac-man or the space-ship games didn’t make me do that. They made me go pschu! psuchu! laser noises, at best.
It had awesome flying kicks. And those multiple punches to the face. And knives. And splashes of red and mobs of men, falling to their deaths.
The brutality, I realised, helped and appealed. Gaming as transgression. My parents were right to be worried.
Gauntlet (Atari)
A year later and a family holiday. Still no home computer.
To a Butlins holiday camp, or some local knock-off of Butlins. People in coloured jackets. Singing. Chalets. And the best arcade I’d ever seen in my life, with prices lower than anywhere else ever. My brother and I devoured them all, but we paid almost a religious admiration to the hefty, brand-new four-player cabinet that towered like a monolith from a utopian future with excellent waterslides.
It’s easy to forget how innovative Gauntlet was. The four players. The role-playing elements, taking what was still subcultural and integrating it on the main stage of pop-culture. The use of dialogue. “Warrior needs food badly” lives on as a great thing to say whenever you’re hungry. Fast-forward to years later when as a student we’re playing Gauntlet 2, and kill a Dragon to be greeted with the phrase “I have never seen such bravery!”. Yelps from semi-grown men. Gauntlet said something new. For months we were uttering the phrase whenever anyone did the most innocuous thing. Empty the bin? Go out in the rain? Go off to dump an unfortunate ladyfriend? “I have never seen such bravery”. Ah, students. Always happy to give people reasons to hate us.
Even its exploitative elements – feeding the slot coins to get more health – Gauntlet screamed the new.
On the last day of our holiday, we talked our parents into playing. All four of us, against the dungeon. Dad silent and concentrating. Mum Giggling. I don’t remember much about the game, except how wonderful it was to have my parents along for this journey and how I wish it could happen more often. Games are for everyone. Fast-forward over twenty years to last year when my parents were visiting: Rock Band arrived, and my dad was the first person to hammer out on the drums.
It was only when writing this and doing the maths that I drew a line between this summer holiday and the Christmas, when we received a home computer. Or, at least, a Commodore 16, which was close enough to a computer. While I suspect they may have caved anyway, I can’t help but think the communal experience with Gauntlet helped things along.
Move forward another couple of years, to another version of Gauntlet. We’d had a Spectrum+2 by this point, and my brother and I played the 2-player home version of the game for hours. It was a tape multi-load, requiring you to load another bit every eight levels or so. With infinite credits, by carefully planning our deaths, we were able to march on to see what lay ahead. Eventually, one day, we reached the end of the tape. There was no final level. We rewound and started again, barely blinking.
Another lesson: gaming doesn’t end. It goes on. Winning doesn’t matter. The journey is the point; games are experiences. Games are not just games.
Transformers 2005 MUSH (PennMUSH codebase)
Okay, this is something different.
The heart of my teenage years belonged to the Amiga and homes. My home. Friends’ homes. I had friends who loved games and we travelled from home to home to play them. Immortal games. Speedballrainbowislandslemmingssensiblesoccersyndicategravitypower2chaosenginelegendsofvalourcivw
ormsonlywhendrunkharlequinanotherworldstardustliberationpopulouswizkidmonkeyislanddynablaster… oh, games. The Spectrum lived on. As far as my second year of university it was being used as a one-game console for playing Chaos when people crashed out in the early morning, machine passed around the room like – and often alongside – a spliff.
As part of my degree, I’d found myself in a placement year in an American lab in Denver. Random chance. And then I was gaming from home again for the first time since childhood.
At the time, I said I didn’t game. Hindsight proves my definitions were wrong. This was after the death of Amiga Power, which provided my first work. Broke and a little burnt out, I skipped the whole period of ’96-’97 games. It’s an odd hole in my personal gaming history with regards to the mainstream – when Edge was hailing Mario 64, I’d headed a completely different way. In fact, I headed about as far as it’s possible to go. I only prodded it at in a shop before returning to mope in my flat.
I had a pretty shit time in America.
It wasn’t particularly anyone’s fault. I realised swiftly that due to laziness and extreme distractability labwork really wasn’t for me, and so treated every day at the job like a prison sentence, up to and including marking time’s passing with lines on my wall. The people I was working with were lovely, but at least a decade older than me, and with families. As such, I was stuck, without a car, on my own, a long way from any place I’d want to go, and was bored to the point of insensibility. It was seven months into the ten before I’d managed to locate my sort of people to have fun trouble with, by which point – and looking back at the sort of ill-advised adventures we went on – I suspect I was more than a little bit mental.
It was also the year when I went native on the internet. I ran a website, lived on mailing list, and discovered MUSHes.
You’ll probably be aware of MUDs, the text-based Multi-User Dungeons which were the first to explore the place the modern MMOs colonised. MUSHes – Multi User Shared Hallucinations – were, if the acronym didn’t give it away, the poncier side of it. Imagine a role-play server where 98% of the time you were going hey-nonny-no! in the chatroom. They were nothing but the proverbial glorified chatroom.
On the other hand, they were glorious chatrooms.
At the beginning of the trip, I had no idea they existed. I knew about MUDs. I also knew how much they could devour your life, from the all-night sessions some of my housemates had at the university labs. That didn’t sound that interesting to me. That sounded like doing the same repetitive things for hours. Surely that wouldn’t catch on? As history proves, I was totally right on one observation, and totally wrong on the other.
I discovered Transformers 2005 MUSH by running through the corridors of the internet, seeing with amazement that there appeared to be enormous functioning community of fans for anything on there. This was, I stress, 1997 and we were amazed by such things back then. I didn’t count myself as a Transformers fan. I liked the toys as a kid. I read the (superior) British comics back then. I hadn’t really paid much attention to them for over a decade. The idea of an ongoing free-form roleplaying game set in the universe, just after the end of the films… it intrigued me. I had an idea for a character, applied, and soon I was playing. For hours a day. To the point where I ended up in serious trouble with my lab supervisor.
MUSHes are roleplaying games, but they’re primarily plotless. Proper events – TinyPlots – are planned, which people can come and join in with – but much is based around players just hanging around and improvising scenes in character. Instructions are posed, with it entirely up to you to describe what your character does in either curt sentences or enormous florid passages of purest spam. Tf2k5 had a relatively complicated combat system with a load of statistics, but later MUSHes I joined – with themes not based around enormous warring robots – operated off little more than a +roll command to decide who would win when no consensus could be reached. Improvised roleplay with vestigial gaming. Performance art a sentence at a time.
I’d be interested to know how many people reading this played any MUSHes. It’s something that few actually talk about. The closest to a games journalist exploring it is Leigh Alexander’s regular riffs on her time playing Yahoo-Chat Final Fantasy roleplay, which isn’t quite the same thing – MUSHes have maps, places to build, things to interact with. I’m comfortable calling them a game and keeping them in the same part of my head as the Hobbit.
When I got back to England, I continued to play in a more casual fashion. Well, relatively casual. With the pay-for-dial-up of the time I built an enormous phone-bill despite that. But the real work was done, in terms of what it taught me about gaming. It was a social game which provided me, in my lowest year, a social life and drama-aplenty. It left me with the ability to type at my normal ludicrous speed and honed my ability to pull ludicrous metaphors and turns of phrase from the ether – it was a real part of how the year of isolation turned me from an adept StuCampell/JNash/TaylorParkes/NeilKulkarni copyist into something approaching someone with their own style. And those hours gave my first experience with RSI, which haunted me down the years.
Games can sustain you. Games can improve you. Games can destroy you.
Thief: The Dark Project (Looking Glass)
Next time I left home to play games, the mood was more triumphal. After the experiences in the sciences, I knew my degree was useless. So I did the bare minimum of work and concentrated on writing. Somehow – the old stat about 1 in 10 people leaving university claiming they were looking for work in the media, and there only being jobs for 1 in 100, nagged at me while I worked bars in those months after graduation – I got a job. PC Gamer hired me as a staff writer. I was to work in a room with a mass of relatively young, booze-hungry men, and one woman whose job was to scare us all into doing some work occasionally.
And I was, apparently, going to review some games.
Thief wasn’t the first game I reviewed (The Chaos Engine was, back in my home town, just to see what it felt like). It wasn’t the first game I’d reviewed professionally (UFO on the A500 for Amiga Power). It wasn’t the sample review I sent with my CV (The Curse of Monkey Island). It wasn’t the first game I’d reviewed in the office (which was some racing game which I had to play briefly and write a 300 word review for in half an hour as part of the interview process). It wasn’t even the first game I reviewed as a staff writer (which was a 280 word micro-review of a rendered adventure which I can remember nothing of bar I kicked it to death). But since that was delayed until the following issue, my debut as a writer for PC Gamer in the magazine was Looking Glass’s magnum opus.
It seems miraculous to me now. It’s like if Lester Bangs’ first assignment was to go and interview the Velvet Underground. Within the first week on the job, I’d found my Lou Reed.
Of course, yeah, I know. Egotistical on all sorts of levels. But I was nothing but ego back then, with a tower of McCain Oven Chips bags wobbling on each shoulder, and everything to prove. The only thing was that I didn’t realise how important it was. I lacked context. I was new to the world of PCs, only having owned one for a few months previously – never being rich enough to own such a thing before. The Ultima Underworlds, System Shock; these were games I knew by reputation, and little else. I was coming to the world’s premier stealth game clean. And I could see all the parts of it mesh together. I could see how elegant its stealth-mechanism was, so obviously better than the digital fakery of Metal Gear Solid (Thief was Defender to MGS’s Pac-Man). Most importantly, I could see the ghosts of all those other games of the past: I was shouting incredulously at the Hobbit, because in my head, it looked like Thief. This was it. This is how games should be.
Almost gave it a mark in the seventies, of course. The Bonehoard almost made me give up. I persisted and ended up giving it ninety. Which sound kinda mean, until you remember I was a AP veteran and true believer. As such, I’d never given a ninety before in my life.
The lesson, however, comes about a year later when I find myself in drunken conversation with a Looking Glass veteran who’s over to show off Thief 2. I mumble an opinion that I tended to think of them as this sort of progressive, intelligent developer. I mean, in 60s rock terms, kind of the Velvet Underground.
She doesn’t blink: “Oh, yeah. Totally”.
The lesson being: people believe in games as much as you do.
The lesson being: you’re not an idiot to think that.
The lesson being: you’re not an idiot to think.
Thief, in a real way, justified my entire approach to the medium. So, if you’re ever looking for something to blame, blame it.
Alternatively, the friend who showed me the Hobbit. If he only made me play football, you could have all been spared.
08/07/2009 at 20:36 BrokenSymmetry says:
This almost reads like another manifesto. uh oh.
08/07/2009 at 20:37 Greg Wild says:
Agreed on Thief. That game really has defined all my criteria for “a good game”. Style. Story. Depth. Characters. Unique game mechanics. Plant Ladies.
I look back on it knowing that from it onwards, any opinion I hold about a game goes back some how whether or not I feel like it uses the gaming medium as well as Thief does.
08/07/2009 at 20:38 qrter says:
Funny. The first game I played was The Hobbit, too. On the ol’ Spectrum. You could go and have a bath while the cassettetape was loading, yet you never did, you just sat there and waited.
08/07/2009 at 20:39 Lobotomist says:
We used to call Spectrum : Eraser. Because of its rubber keys. And C64 was called : Fatty. There used to be quite a war between C64 fans and Spectrum fans…
Ah good times :)
08/07/2009 at 20:41 LlamaFarmer says:
These are awesome, really looking forward to John’s :)
08/07/2009 at 20:42 manintheshack says:
Fantastic stuff. You need to write that book, Mr Gillen.
08/07/2009 at 20:42 Alec Meer says:
The Hobbit on the Spectrum popped my gaming cherry too. I couldn’t identify the precise impact it had on me, alas.
08/07/2009 at 20:47 Dreamhacker says:
Ah, Thief. It didn’t just leave a mark, it left three arrows and an empty purse.
It was also on of the first 3D FPS’s where the 3D graphics didn’t feel tacked on just to fit in with the cool kids.
An important part of PC gaming history.
08/07/2009 at 20:48 TheArmyOfNone says:
Awesome article as always. W00t RPS!
08/07/2009 at 20:55 Taillefer says:
Greg,
That’s exactly what I do. Sure, there have been good games. Excellent games. But none are the gaming epiphany that Thief was. No game has affected me so much before or since. I often loathe the fact I can never enjoy games as much simply because they’re not Thief.
08/07/2009 at 21:01 Joe says:
If I were doing one of these then Thief would definitely be on my list for sure, but for an entirely different reason. For me, the lesson I took from Thief was an expansion on the one I took from ye olde Lucasarts adventures. One taught me that games could tell ‘proper’ stories that I could understand and want to be in and love, but it was Thief which taught me about the adult version of those stories and how to share them with other adults. If Monkey Island was like reading through an Enid Blyton novel and sharing an enjoyment with my brother, then Thief was reading through The Once and Future King and sharing the experience with my Father. It taught me that stories could deal with mature themes, that the reader could become part of the story (“I killed that guard you killed when I played that bit”) and that those types of stories could be shared with entirely different people. Monkey Island introduced me to games, but it was Thief that introduced me to Gaming.
So, yeah – bravo.
08/07/2009 at 21:01 TooNu says:
Yea another awesome read, nice idea guys and lot’s to think about my own gaming heritage. If you hadn’t have chosen Gauntlet, I might have picked it for mine but I can’t now, because it would be like copying.
I played it in Scotland in Aviemore in a hotel with my dad while the rest of the adults were drinking and talking, me being the only kid and bored off my face got a bit restless and so to the arcade room we went. I was the wizard and dad was the warrior and only a vague memory or that moment still remains.
Getting the game for our Commodore was probably the most awesome day of my young 4 year old life..a few years later when my brother and I were still playing it, got to some level like…98 or there abouts and mom unplugged the C64′s transformer to use the hoover…………………..
08/07/2009 at 21:06 PaulMorel says:
Loved Thief. One of the best games I have ever played. I will never forget the cutscenes. Those cutscenes made me want to become an artist/animator.
08/07/2009 at 21:10 Severian says:
lovely piece. enjoyed reading it thoroughly.
08/07/2009 at 21:13 Rob says:
Issue 65 nostalgia fans. Amusingly The Settlers III got the prime review spot.
08/07/2009 at 21:13 Cooper says:
On the subject of MUShes
http://www.cantr.net
kinda counts. Think Wurm Online, but slightly more freeform and text based
08/07/2009 at 21:28 Clovus says:
Elf shot the food!
Loved playing gauntlet (NES) with my brother and friends. It may have been the first really fun multiplayer experience for me. I loved that it had such great griefing built into it!
08/07/2009 at 21:29 Serondal says:
I’ve probably spend close to 3000-4000 hours play mushs when I was younger. Literally from the time I was 14 to the time I was 20 I probably played 8 hours a day . sad sad sad
08/07/2009 at 21:30 crumbsucker says:
No love for Deus Ex?
08/07/2009 at 21:32 Pags says:
Having to pick only a handful of games that shaped your gaming life in a meaningful way? I have never seen such bravery!
08/07/2009 at 21:36 Psychopomp says:
Dammit, Kieron.
I’d no idea what “spliff,” meant, so I google it.
Lo and behold, google decides I need a visual aid.
OH HEY IS THAT MY GRANDMA IN THE ROOM WHY YES IT IS.
Akward.
08/07/2009 at 21:37 Smurfy says:
I’m going to sue RPS unless you start talking about games I’ve played or, in most cases, heard of in these posts.
08/07/2009 at 21:37 fishoil says:
Glad Gauntlet got a mention. I played the hell out of that when I was about 8
08/07/2009 at 21:40 spinks says:
I played a lot of MUSHes. I helped build MUSHes, I staffed MUSHes, I played the heck out of them too. I was big into White Wolf’s Vampire RPG at the time but didn’t know many people in London to play with (they all wanted to play D&D). Then I discovered MUSHes ….
08/07/2009 at 21:40 sinister agent says:
It wasn’t the first game I’d reviewed professionally (UFO on the A500 for Amiga Power).
You jammy bast. Good read, this, though.
08/07/2009 at 21:45 Antsy says:
Loved The Hobbit on the speccy, although I think Urban Upstart may have been the first adventure game I played on it. I’d need to check that. Thorin sits down and sings about glue.
08/07/2009 at 21:52 nabeel says:
Cool, only one of them I would have expected – and also the only one I even know about – the rest all refreshingly unfamiliar.
08/07/2009 at 21:56 Serondal says:
Actually now that I calculate this out I’ve probably played about 17520 hours of Mushs . . . that is pretty sad :(
08/07/2009 at 21:57 JonFitt says:
“Speedballrainbowislandslemmingssensiblesoccersyndicategravitypower2chaosenginelegendsofvalour
civwormsonlywhendrunkharlequinanotherworldstardustliberationpopulouswizkidmonkeyislanddynablaster”
Best game ever!
08/07/2009 at 21:59 Owen says:
It’s freaky reading these articles about games I’ve not thought about, yet alone played, in well over 2 decades. Freaky in a lovely reminiscent way though.
Jesus though Kieron. It’s not often someone mentions a game that I’ve FORGOTTEN about. Kung Fu Master, holy shit I loved that game. Cheers.
08/07/2009 at 22:01 Kieron Gillen says:
sinister agent: Not so lucky. It took getting on for 40 minutes to take an AI turn. I kicked it. I should have kicked it more.
But my UFO review is a different story and… see what I mean?
Serondal: Never count. It will only make you cry.
KG
08/07/2009 at 22:02 Gnarl says:
My fear that doing an high-minded article biased towards the effect the games had on the writer might have caused Mr. Gillen to sprain something seems to have been unfounded.
08/07/2009 at 22:13 Serondal says:
If I had spent that time working where I do now I could have made 262800 dollars , makes you think lol.
08/07/2009 at 22:17 JonFitt says:
I wish Psygnosis (or whoever owns it now), would re-launch Lemmings. That was a great puzzle game. Maybe Popcap could do it justice?
Did anyone else draw out maps for Lemmings complete with them splattering in gruesome ways?
08/07/2009 at 22:18 Tim James says:
It’s both an article on Kieron’s gaming history and a lesson in wacky British culture courtesy of Wikipedia.
Tell us more about your McGillicuddy men machines that roamed Northern England and terrorized children!
08/07/2009 at 22:23 Serondal says:
JonFitt Yes , yes sir I did. Did you ever play Lemmings 2 where it had all kinds of exotic Lemmings like Space Marine Lemmings set in Alien’s like levels and superman lemmings that flew towards your mouse pointer? I never saw any of those guys show up again and never been able to find that game any where since then :( My older brother got it at school from a friend and let me have it.
08/07/2009 at 22:25 george says:
arnt you that ginger guy from pc gamer from about eight or nine years ago?
08/07/2009 at 22:27 Bhazor says:
Hmm, I’m too astounded by that pun to read the article. Well played.
08/07/2009 at 22:31 PleasingFungus says:
That was… a really, really good article. (Or whatever you’d want to classify this as.)
Now I feel like digging out the old Thief disks and having another go at it. Think I know where they’re lurking…
08/07/2009 at 22:38 Sunjammer says:
Thief completely sucker punched me. I spent hours and hours and hours just with the demo, playing and replaying. When the actual game came out and had Burricks and Zombies and whatnot i was actually very harshly turned off. I wanted to sneak around, and in my mind all this magical fantasy stuff didn’t sit well alongside people in the “things you’re supposed to sneak around” box.
Kieron, did you review Thief 2? I haven’t read what you think of that game and i’d be curious about how you feel about it. It came out relatively soon after and fixed so many wrongs with the previous game it made me almost shocked at how much i’d enjoyed the first.
08/07/2009 at 22:39 Chicken Dinner says:
I miss being a kid. I actually used to play a version of Gauntlet in the school playground where we’d go around bashing people and kicking over bins, then spinning around on manhole covers to go ‘down’ to the next level. Fun times.
08/07/2009 at 22:41 Funky Badger says:
Played The Hobbit with my Dad – looking back, its gratifying that he could never get past the PALE BULBOUS EYES either.
Spent far too much time and creative effort on MUSHes. They were fun, but not healthy places. Or at least, not places populated by healthy people… nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to stay.
08/07/2009 at 22:41 hydra9 says:
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I love these articles. Let’s have more than four – Get ahold of Quinns!
This also brought back many nostalgic memories, particularly of playing games with my brother. And the first text adventure I played; some educational title on the BBC called ‘Martello Towers’ – It got me totally hooked anyway.
08/07/2009 at 22:50 ACS says:
Man. I played DarkMetal MUSH for years and years and years and years. I think my primary character on that MUSH has more hours invested in him than, literally, anything I have ever done other than my marriage.
And, strangely, even after having done that, I have surprisingly little to say about MUSHing — which I did from around 1992 to around 2004. It provided a creative outlet. It was probably one of the best ways to do online RPGs, on account of the pretentious insistence that everyone be able to write a whole sentence.
I suppose it’s because I’ve never actually talked about it with anyone — it was such a weird little niche of a hobby that, if I did, no one would know what I was talking about.
08/07/2009 at 23:01 JonFitt says:
@Serondal
I think I had all the Lemmings games until they went 3D and rubbish. Lemmings 2 went completely over the top, it was brilliant. I seem to remember some sort of choose your own power set sandbox mode which I’d spend lots of time in just messing around.
I remember a medieval setting too where there was an archer lemming, and some way to fire ballistas or catapults?
I found the actual levels in Lemmings 2 got really hard though.
08/07/2009 at 23:03 Nick says:
The trees appear to move.
08/07/2009 at 23:04 Serondal says:
ACS – EXACTLY ! No one I’ve ever known in real life has ANY idea what a Mush is :P I did date a girl I met through a MUSH and needless to say that didn’t turn out well.
08/07/2009 at 23:05 Carra says:
Yeah, calculating that I spent ~50.000 hours on WoW does make me cry a little inside.
You never do know if the first game you play is really a great game or if it’s just great because you have nothing to compare it to. The first PC game I played was Caesar 2. I still remember it as one of the best games I’ve ever played. It showed me that games could be more complex then one button to move Sonic and one button to jump (although that was also tons of fun of course). That you had to actually think in some games! It started my love for PC games.
08/07/2009 at 23:09 Carra says:
Shoo edit buttons but now that I think twice about it, 50.000 is having one 0 too many. That should be 5.000 hours. Still enough to earn 50.000 euros. Damn that /played command in WoW. Ah well, I did have fun doing it :)
08/07/2009 at 23:10 jalf says:
Lemmings 2 was AWESOME! I spent so much time on it with a friend on his amiga. And later, I spent even more time on it when I got hold of the (sadly inferior, graphics- and sound-wise) PC version.
I always got bored of the other Lemmings games after a while, but 2 just never got old.
08/07/2009 at 23:10 Funky Badger says:
Carra – your calculations need work, doesn’t that come out as around 18 years at 8 hours per day?
08/07/2009 at 23:11 Funky Badger says:
Carra: – *phew*
08/07/2009 at 23:14 JonFitt says:
Just the box art of Lemmings 2 takes me back.
Lemmings 2: the Tirbes
World of Lemmings (3)
08/07/2009 at 23:16 Stu says:
The Hobbit was one of the first games I ever played, too. I was stuck in the very first room until I realised that, despite the manual’s boast that the parser understood plain English (sorry, “INGLISH”), sentences such as PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR wouldn’t actually work, and a simple OPEN DOOR would suffice. This taught me the lesson that you should treat your computer with contempt at all times. It’s certainly worked for me so far.
08/07/2009 at 23:17 Serondal says:
Anyone remember that cave man game called Humans that was a mix between Lost Vikings (Before Lost Vikings came out I believe) and Lemmings where you had to save the cave men on each level ? :P Also I used to play a lot of Commando Keen or I think it was Keen Dreams (The one wtih the veggies that tried to kill you) and Duke Nukem 1 and 2. I blame my parents for making me who I am lol.
When my parents first got me a computer (at them I guess, though they never used it for anything but a)Keep track of bills and b ) My dad used a cool work out program that helped him keep track of his progress, now he uses Wii Fit lol) They got prodigy internet service and blocked the normal webpages from me so I coudln’t see stuff I shouldn’t see. Of course I cracked that in like 3 minutes after my dad left the room and before you know it I was being exposed to all sorts of horrible things like 20 year old men asking me disgusting questions in chat rooms, Lesiuire Suit Larry, and the Barbie Twins ;P
08/07/2009 at 23:28 solipsistnation says:
I MUSHed a bit around 1995, although I forget which one it was… I created a character who was from the Culture and wrote a scripted drone that followed me around and did stuff. I got a job or something and didn’t get very far with it, but it was fun…
08/07/2009 at 23:30 Dizzy says:
Fantasy World Dizzy for the spectrum stole my gaming virginity. It had a guard then an apple then a boulder then a rat then a crocodile then a dragon!
Cue shouts of ‘Woah!’ from 5 year olds
08/07/2009 at 23:31 Stu says:
Actually, I just tried PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR in the Hobbit and it only went and bloody worked, didn’t it? Either I’m misremembering (maybe I was trying something a little more complex, like PLEASE WILL YOU OPEN THE DOOR) or everything I know is based on LIES.
08/07/2009 at 23:33 Homunculus says:
That’ll do, Gillen. That’ll do.
Gotta agree with hydra9 up there; I’d love to read one of these influences articles from both members of RPS’ third axis. The origin of Tim Stone’s love of all things grognard in particular.
08/07/2009 at 23:35 eyemessiah says:
I played Otherspace Mush for a while, which was some kind of crazy overblown space opera thing run by an ego maniac who was apparently writing some grand series of novels based on the in-game events. I convinced a friend to join me in OS and sent him a primer email regarding things to think about in terms what kind of character he might want and what kind of plot impact he wanted to have. I think it was the length of multiple graduate dissertations.
I think OS pretty much sated my hunger for MU* games, and after I was done with two characters or so I never looked back.
Oh look, its still going!
08/07/2009 at 23:39 Serondal says:
I played on a couple of star wars related ones with some pretty detailed starship simulation and several wtih armies in them but got hooked to the fantasy/bdsm adults ones and one about Gore O.o If my father had any idea what I was up to he would have thrown that computer away a LOoooong time ago. Did I mention MUSHs ruined my life ? : P
08/07/2009 at 23:44 eyemessiah says:
@ACS – I know what you mean. I don’t think I have ever discussed that kind of play with anyone. To be honest I kind of forgot that for a fair while I spent almost all of my waking hours hunched over a keyboard speed typing epic emotes (which in the long term would sadly never compare with wow’s /dance :)).
As much as I enjoyed it I honestly can’t think of much to say about it. Perhaps we need counselling?
08/07/2009 at 23:47 Serondal says:
I think we do Eyemessiah, at least I know I do.
09/07/2009 at 00:06 Novotny says:
Ah, I enjoyed that.
I’m about three years older, and was slightly luckier in the home computer side of things.
But more importantly to this thread, I have mad landmark memories. Seeing Pong in an arcade machine for the first time. Then Space Invaders! Fuck me, I was transfixed.
Getting what I believed at the time was the world highscore on Defender. Atari 600XL, 29mill score and I couldn’t guess how many spare lives; I’d played all day long on this one ‘go’ and was desperately thinking about how to take a photo of the screen. My dad was thinking I should have a a bath. Cue system turned off at mains, and my still having issues. (A FUCKING WORLD HIGH SCORE!)
Paradroid :D
US Gold! Beach Head!
Elite, for crying out loud. An entire summer spent at my mates with the curtains closed after I convinced my Dad that the afore-mentioned Atari was a better buy.
Knight Lore! Ultimate Play the Game! My next door neighbours had a Sinclair household, whilst mine was distinctly US – Commodore/Atari.
Oh man, add-on ram packs for the ZX81 that were distinctly hot to the touch, And the size of AC adaptors, if I remember correctly.
Seeing Doom for the first time, after I had stopped playing games and started with guitars and trying to pull women. Result: back to games, immediately. Actually stayed at the house with the computer and Doom, and my mates went on out as originally planned. I didn’t care. I had found a new nirvana. I got kicked out about 4 in the morning I think.
Oh god I’m so old.
I’m going to fuck off to a cave to smoke and reminisce
09/07/2009 at 00:25 Serondal says:
Mmmm caves, I remember when I first discovered caves . . . oh wait what?
09/07/2009 at 00:27 Bhazor says:
Novotny
Damn straight you guys are old.
My first game? Super Mario World.
Beat that as a first game!
09/07/2009 at 00:28 Archonsod says:
I spent more time at Uni on MUDs and MUSHS than I did in lectures I think. Between bouts on the original GTA and longstanding Master of Magic. Ah, the mid – late nineties.
Oh, and Kung Fu Master, don’t think I’ve seen that since the C64 died. I used to love that game. Wasn’t as good as Bruce Lee for the fighting moves though. Or fat green men.
09/07/2009 at 00:41 Serondal says:
I was playing MAster of Magic yesterday, I love that game so much. I can’t think of anything yet that has beat it in my mind (in the same genre) Age of Wonders comes close, Age of Wonders 2 was foul though.
09/07/2009 at 00:50 Novotny says:
God I could rant on about the games of the 80s forever.
Also, must mention – got a letter published in Big K!
And Zzap!64, how I loved you.
Where’s Rignall these days?
09/07/2009 at 01:01 Will Tomas says:
I never played MUSHes, but there was a definite long period of my life from the age of 15-19 where I did chat/messageboard RP. All in the same place too, where the same people contributed to the boards as to the chat. Although it was a rather sad way to procrastinate away from study (which is what, basically, I used it for… to start with anyway) I swear it made me a better writer. Having to constantly describe what was happening and how the character felt, and seeing how other people did it, and did it wrong… It was all practice writing that genuinely made me better at it.
09/07/2009 at 01:01 Will Tomas says:
That would have been from about 2000-2004, I guess.
09/07/2009 at 01:03 Will Tomas says:
What I would be curious about is whether that sort of thing exists anymore, or whether the equivalent is only in MMOs… Where do the kids go these days for the same sort of thing?
09/07/2009 at 01:08 Kieron Gillen says:
During the research for this, I checked out TF2k5′s site. It’s still going, apparently with about as many people as it ever had. Seeing the in-game time-line stretch across a decade after I stopped playing was kinda inspirational in some way.
I suspect the people who are attracted to MUSH type entertainment are no more or less than they’ve ever been. It’s the definition of niche.
KG
09/07/2009 at 01:17 solipsistnation says:
People talking about playing MUDs and MUSHes while at college/university reminds me– back in the early 90′s, the glory days of MUDding, we used to be able to tell which freshman would be gone by Christmas by wandering through the fancy unix workstation lab and seeing who was MUDding. If we went through twice in a day more than 4 hours apart and the person was still there with the same MUD windows open and didn’t appear to have left and come back in the meantime, it was pretty much guaranteed that the next term they’d either have sworn off online gaming entirely or they’d be gone. Sometimes they’d just get a scolding from their parents or get put on academic probation, really get to work and manage to recover, but usually they’d lose their financial aid (or parental support) and end up dropping out.
There were always a few… September was a tedious time in the labs, since new freshman often didn’t realize that just because the guy next to them was also MUDding it didn’t mean that everyone in the lab was too. Or, for that matter, they didn’t realize that everyone in the lab didn’t want to hear about their exploits.
09/07/2009 at 01:42 Would prefer to remain anonymous says:
I spent an absurd amount of time MUSHing in the late ’90s (World of Darkness, mostly–Dark Metal, Mercygrounds, Cajun Nights–with the occasional foray into Fading Suns or elsewhere). I enjoyed it a great deal, but slowly played less and less as I found I’d had my fill.
I do look back at the hundreds or thousands of hours I spent hunting vampires and chatting in text-based nightclubs and coffee houses and wonder if it was well spent. On the other hand, my life would’ve been very different without–MUSHing kept me involved in pen-and-paper RPGs, which eventually became a career, which led to a career as a video game designer (on an MMO, no less, circling back). MUSHing also brought me some very dear friends who I’m still close with almost a decade after quitting. Other folk I remember fondly and am sorry to have lost track of.
My very vague impression is that MUSHes aren’t dead, but much of the natural audience for them has moved onto LiveJournal-type play-by-community “games.” I think the medium will come around again–prose is a happily timeless form–but the death of telnet clients as a standard tool may mean that the next iteration will be web-based. (And I know there are web-based telnet clients, but it’s all a little clumsy.)
Thanks for giving us an excuse to discuss and reminisce, Kieron!
– Essex / Pietro / Helmut / so many other old MUSH names!
09/07/2009 at 02:43 Angus says:
fantastic article, kieron.
except what’s wrong with neil kulkarni?!
i quite like him :P
09/07/2009 at 02:52 MD says:
Angus says:
what’s wrong with neil kulkarni?!
I had to read the “… year of isolation turned me from an adept StuCampell/JNash/TaylorParkes/NeilKulkarni copyist into something approaching someone with their own style” line a couple of times, but I’m pretty sure that by ‘copyist’ Kieron just meant ‘one who copies’, i.e. he had been imitating their styles rather than giving voice to his own.
09/07/2009 at 02:55 MD says:
And I’m not saying Keiron was wrong to use it that way, just that for some reason my brain initially wanted to parse it as another word for a writer, implying that those guys were competent but generic. Which I assume is how you read it, Angus, but I might be wrong on that too.
09/07/2009 at 03:31 ACS says:
I guess if I were to write an article on MUSHes, it’d be on one of two facts:
First, the fact that almost every long-running MUSH was run by a woman. DarkMetal (Treason). PernMUSH (Amberyl). Masquerade (Treason, again, under a different name). DuneMUSH (That woman who isn’t Amberyl but whom I always confused with Amberyl). The half-dozen horrible open-chargen DarkMetal clones — not that DarkMetal wasn’t horrible itself, but the others were horrible in different ways. All run by real-life actual women. In a largely male environment.
Second, the fact that those MUSHes that were not run by women were run by Geoff Tuffli. Who is now designing the combat system for Champions. Which is going to make me buy a Champions system whether I like it or not. Geoff’s the guy that learned Nahuatl to construct his own vocabulary and grammar for a niche-niche-niche MUSH called Gohs, which was also very good, while it ran.
09/07/2009 at 03:41 malkav11 says:
A Transformers MUSH? What a wonderfully geeky thing to disclose about oneself.
I certainly knew about MUSHes. I think I may have actually fiddled with one or two, but they didn’t stick. I’m more than happy to roleplay with a group of friends around a card table, but doing it with people I don’t know outside of their online persona? No way. Uh-uh. Not gonna happen.
I do of course have a long history with MUDs, as they were a number of crucial things for my early gaming days: free (I had no money. Literally, none. I was, after all, about 13 when I first discovered them.), platform independent (the home computer was a Mac), essentially infinite (so they could keep me playing for what turned out to be years), and veeeeery low bandwidth (so I could play on a 14.4 modem). Now that I have money and can buy games they don’t really hold up next to singleplayer stuff or the big budget MMOs, but they were perfect for that phase of my life.
And I have a…gosh, 8 or 9 year at least running account on a MUCK that I log into whenever I’m home. I don’t know what differentiates a MUCK from a MUSH aside perhaps from codebase, or perhaps philosophy. Like MUSHes, MUCKs don’t focus on the sort of scripted gameplay MUDs do, but in at least this particular case, there’s also no overall roleplaying setup or any of that – there are some roleplaying areas, but the MUCK at large caters to all sorts of other social activities. Myself, I’m there to hang out with some very good online friends. (Honestly, it’s not unlike Second Life except that a) it’s entirely and totally free, b) it runs perfectly on just about any system, and c) because it’s textual, it relies on writing skill and imagination rather than 3D modelling ability. Something I find much more conducive to enjoying myself.)
09/07/2009 at 04:02 Weylund says:
I think I *read* that UFO review for the A500, despite not owning an Amiga. Made me wish I had an A500. :)
Did no one own an Atari? Star Raiders, anyone? Oh, right, UK. Or an Apple? Tass Times in Tonetown?
And why has NO ONE mentioned Wasteland?
09/07/2009 at 04:03 Weylund says:
Oh, and I played tons of Battletech MUXs towards the end of high school. Good stuff.
09/07/2009 at 04:33 Kommissar Nicko says:
Most of these games are so removed from my experience, I cannot comment on them. But, as as one who is about as close to a native Denverite as one can get, let me apologize to you Kieron, for my fair city. You just can’t live without a car here, and I can understand your isolation.
09/07/2009 at 07:04 lesslucid says:
Lovely article, and your memories intersect with mine in all kinds of refreshing ways. Especially The Hobbit; I remember reading the manual that came with it (wasn’t allowed to actually play it on the day I got it) and was so excited about all the things that it seemed it was going to be possible to do… when I discovered it was all just text with a few static pictures, I felt a kind of pang of disappointment but at the same time wanted to convince myself that I’d known that that was what it was and was what I had wanted all along… I never did get past fucking Rivendell without a walkthrough, though.
09/07/2009 at 07:27 Gassalasca says:
manintheshack says:
Fantastic stuff. You need to write that book, Mr Gillen.
Indeed.
09/07/2009 at 08:13 cullnean says:
@KG
AH HA at least i now know where the passion for a big stompy Transformers mmo comes from.
09/07/2009 at 08:16 Kieron Gillen says:
Would prefer to remain anonymous: I suspect given the choice, I would too.
I’ve more to write about my time on the MUSHes, but never quite worked out a way to do it. Mostly because the most interesting stuff I would feel exploitative writing about in almost any way. Maybe one day I’ll work out a way.
But one of the things which almost made it into this piece was about whether it was time well spent. That it was such a jealous lover made me suspect it was. It’s the definition of masturbatory, all this writing just released into a moment for the buzz of the immediately response, and a new writing challenge with the unpredictable response. It started to depress me seeing people who were really decent writers not doing anything with it. In other words, I suspect my work ethic got to me.
I think one of the key moments was when I was telling the guy I based Kid-with-Knife from Phonogram about my main alt, and the ridiculously intricate back story I’d built for him. And he was incredulous: why aren’t you doing this as a book or something, man.
When Kwk was so obviously right, you have to question youself.
Nicko: No apologies required. The people in Denver were lovely. Except one police officer, but that’s a different story.
ACS: I totally didn’t know that about Champions. Interesting.
Generally: Yes, I totally am saying I just lifted my writing style from the four writers listed. I worshipped Kulkarni.
KG
09/07/2009 at 08:19 Kieron Gillen says:
“That it was such a jealous lover made me suspect it was.” I meant “Wasn’t”.
KG
09/07/2009 at 08:21 cullnean says:
Also i remember me and my cousin getting to the end of guantlet and feeling slightly bemused, except the reason it stuck in my mind was because we turned of the C64 and watched the holy grail for the first time and made us shot random phrases on subsequent play through, which lead to a poncy habit i still have of devouring all things python (fnar)
also super mario bros 3, that was the shizzle man never played a better platformer and dont think i ever will.
09/07/2009 at 08:59 Shadowcat says:
Count me in as another varsity MUSHer. The one I frequented was absolutely a glorified chat room (I spent a lot of time on IRC as well), but a chat room in which you could also create things for your friends to play with.
Then one day the server died, and we found it had no backup. All those creations lost in a heartbeat.
09/07/2009 at 09:12 Powers says:
A Mush’s! I dropped about a year and a half into ElendorMUSH in the first year’s of high school, before I had a computer capable of running Half-Life (and Day of Defeat.)
I loved it. I loved it so much! Would get home and play for 6-8 hours till bed. I don’t really regret it though, as the experience really was “hallucinatory” in a sense. Very nostalgic. For me, MUSHs defined a promise of a complete world that MMORPG’s have not yet lived up to.
The definition of niche though, I’ve only met one other person who’s ever heard of them.
09/07/2009 at 09:23 Catastrophe says:
Hungry Horrace – Dragon32, nuff said.
09/07/2009 at 09:36 Morph says:
I never realised that Thief review was your (sort of) first Kieron. Now I get the chance to thank you for it. I had saved my pocket money for a game and everyone was talking about Half Life. But when I got to the shop I saw Thief and remembered the review and went for it. So very very glad I did.
In between playing I would re-read the review just to agree with you. Cripes I can still remember the screenshots, page layout, even some of the text.
09/07/2009 at 09:56 Freudian Slip says:
Reading these things and not having even heard of most of the games on the list makes me feel young. Then I try to think about what games I’d choose and the hangover hurts too much which makes me feel old.
09/07/2009 at 10:12 AbyssUK says:
First game, Phoenix on the arcade.. for some reason my grandad had an tabletop arcade machine (he repaired electrical stuff and somebody left it as payment)… free play phoenix all day long (i was 4)… next crimbo we got a CPC464. Damn nearly bankrupted my parents with it’s green screen, but then we got to play werewolves of London my god that was good.
09/07/2009 at 10:20 AndrewC says:
So just how structured were these MUSHes? Because, as described, it kind of sounds like every message board i’ve ever posted on.
I guess this is the ‘social networking as game’ idea, which is fairly established, but the realisation of gaming yourself (or, at least your online self) still feels weird, like catching your reflection from a funny angle.
So i’ll stop by just saying: ‘Transformers? lol’.
09/07/2009 at 10:33 Lu-Tze says:
“Utopian future with excellent waterslides”
Party on dude.
09/07/2009 at 10:37 phil says:
To go off topic a bit – it’s interesting how the internet facilitates this level and volume of anonymous collective nostalgia for shared childhood fantasies underpinning our current tastes and attitudes – perhaps all we need now is one more reference to Dizzy or Skool Daze for a functioning collective unconscious to crystalise.
09/07/2009 at 10:52 CMaster says:
Question to RPS as a whole – how do you feel about others taking this idea and running with it? Would you (or anyone else here) be interested in reading them?
I’m just quite intrigued by the idea and tempted to try and not only work out the games myself, but write it up.
09/07/2009 at 10:57 Chaz says:
The thing I remember most about the Hobbit, was sniggering at the replies you got if you asked it to perform some rather lewd commands.
09/07/2009 at 11:43 Paul Moloney says:
Used to spend many lunchtimes in school going to a nearby arcade to play Gauntlet with some schoolmates; it really was a game ahead of its time. Stunning someone and grabbing food from under their nose never got old.
Skip forward 21 years, and I played my first multiplayer Gauntlet game since then on XBox Live the other night. Cool.
I tried to play Thief again recently, but one annoyance is that the key bindings are a mess. By default, your character runs. You _can_ set a walk modifier, but that doesn’t work if you move left or right. Argh. I tried creating an AutoHotKey script without much luck, and no-one on the Thief forums could help me.
P.
09/07/2009 at 11:53 Richard Beer says:
Great writing Kieron. You should do it for a living or something.
I remember The Hobbit on a friend’s Spectrum, but had stronger memories of Jetpack.
I think my own first adventure game was actually called “The Adventure Game”, and it was a big, fat cartridge that went into the back of my Vic 20. I can still remember having to DROP the big carpet before DROPping the mirror so that the mirror wouldn’t smash. I even remember that it was written by someone called Scott something… wow… that must be… like a bunch of years ago. Didn’t even realise I remembered all that until I read your article!
09/07/2009 at 11:57 Paul Moloney says:
We also had a MUSH or MUD back in college; it had a levelling-up system where if you were injured, you recovered over time but gained more hitpoints. Of course, I discovered that hitting _yourself_ to the point of near death, then recovering, then repeating, meant I soon had god-like hitpoints, at which point a dungeon master sent me an “Er, Paul….” message.
P.
09/07/2009 at 12:08 animal says:
Now The Hobbit is all good and well, but COME ON, Horace and the Spiders owned it fangs down. When bored of squashing spiders you could always hook him up with some some smooth slopes to ski on. After that Atic Atac, JetPac, Jet Set Willy and IK+ were all right up there.
Attempting to rescue Sylvia in Kung-Fu Master was always fun, although for myself Shinobi was even better. Replaying that until I could finish the game on a single life took quite a bit of practice.
09/07/2009 at 12:16 Richard Beer says:
I preferred Way of the Exploding Fist to Kung Fu, especially punching the bull in the face.
09/07/2009 at 12:24 Richard Beer says:
Oo actually it was called “Adventureland”! Wiki’ing just brought back so many buried memories…. ah happy, innocent days filled with bees.
09/07/2009 at 12:42 leederkrenon says:
“There used to be quite a war between C64 fans and Spectrum fans…”
i am like some kind of japanese soldier found in the jungle 50 years on, for i am still fighting this war. fuck the C64!
09/07/2009 at 12:50 Richard Beer says:
This is too awesome. I really should be working. http://www.freearcade.com/Zplet.jav/Advland.html
09/07/2009 at 13:11 cullnean says:
@leederkrenon
Yeah well the C64 had colours many many colours! i justed to look at the back of the cassete box’s and laugh at the specturm screen shots
how do you answer that good sir!
09/07/2009 at 13:19 Morningoil says:
Gillen! I’m sure you gave Thief 89%! Because didn’t you then agonise about it in your Thief 2 review??
09/07/2009 at 13:20 Morningoil says:
PS I’m not some kind of obsessive saddo. I just seem to happen to remember that little factoid.
09/07/2009 at 13:22 Morningoil says:
PPS Am still playing through Thief again, taking it slowly, savouring it. And it really still is that good. Better, in fact. Now one has enough distance and perspective to divorce it from the tech, from the LG legacy, one realises just how astonishingly good it is.
Even the zombies bug me less this time round.
09/07/2009 at 13:33 Colthor says:
GameRankings say PCGUK (ie. Kieron) gave it 90.
It was a good review. You don’t remember many reviews over ten years later, but that’s one of them.
09/07/2009 at 14:13 shon says:
I went through a period where I stopped writing all together due to a persistent bout of anxiety. It was a combination of 9/11 and getting laid off from my job. Playing the Discworld MUSH was fun, but it also eased me back into writing.
09/07/2009 at 14:30 clive dunn says:
@leederkrenon. I’m still in that jungle too. I’m not entirely sure why the spectrum was so much better than the C64 but it is one of the few certainties in life that i still cling to. Can someone break it down for me and prove once and for why the speccy was the better machine.
We had colours, it was just you couldn’t change the colour of the individual pixels; they were in blocks of 8×8. Clever programmers (nay artists) could get a lot of colour variety. Anyway, games as awesome as Knightlore (how the fuck did they do that with just 48k) and Laser Squad didn’t need loads of colours.
Was it me or were the C64 pixels bigger than the speccy’s? Was the speccy HD before it’s time?
09/07/2009 at 14:32 clive dunn says:
@leederkrenon. Fuck me, i’ve just noticed your avatar! Is that the actual Leeder Krenon?
Who was the little whipper snapper with the pistol from Rebelstar? Dammit, i’ve gotta go back and play it again….
“Don’t make me go in the cupboard again daddy……”
09/07/2009 at 14:36 cullnean says:
Shakes fist @clive dunn
http://c64vsspectrum.com/R.html BIFF
http://c64vsspectrum.com/O.html POW
http://c64vsspectrum.com/Y.html BAM
need more proof heathens?
09/07/2009 at 14:40 clive dunn says:
Worst. Proof. Ever.
09/07/2009 at 14:40 cullnean says:
in fact that site is like a gold mine of my youth and im only 30
we have come a long way fellas
09/07/2009 at 14:48 cullnean says:
at least no ones waded in flapping their gums about amstrads.
09/07/2009 at 14:49 Paul Moloney says:
The Spectrum was lovable _because_ it was a little crap. The Spectrum was to the Commodore 64 as the PC is the Apple. I have owned both a Spectrum and a PC which, honestly, occasionally needed a whack on the side to start them up, Doctor Who-like (in the PC’s case, a hard drive was dodgy; with the Spectrum, there was a particular chip that would slip out of its socket, and a whack would settle it back in again).
P.
09/07/2009 at 15:13 clive dunn says:
@cullnean. lol, no-one would dare defend a Amstrad. Jesus, they were truely shite.
I used to resolder my first spectrum from time to time; i’d blow a small hand held fan through it in the summer as well. I like to think i was overclocking the poor thing!
09/07/2009 at 15:16 cullnean says:
@clive dunn
i will in no way mind you, admit to having my tiny little mind blown by elite on my uncles spectrum
hang on im not doing this right
09/07/2009 at 15:21 clive dunn says:
I think the earliest work of computer genius i played was 3D Ant Attack. That thing played like a beautiful tense film for me. Just you and your girl and those terrifying ants!
@Cullnean. Lots of arcade ‘ports’ on that comparison site. Porting never really worked on the spectrum. Something PC’s are still struggling with i guess
09/07/2009 at 15:33 Paul Moloney says:
Oh, Ant Attack was quite brilliant. When you look at Gauntlet on the Spectrum now, it looked like an absolute mess, yet I played for hours _and_ bought the “Deeper Dungeons” add-on pack.
“Tau Ceti” and the follow-up “Academy” were also excellent immersive space-sims – Academy even let you design your own ships, including the cockpit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Ceti_(video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_(computer_game)
P.
09/07/2009 at 15:54 Azazel says:
Interestingly (um kinda) the issue wherein KG reviews Thief is the earliest copy of PCG that I have in the big massive stack of them that I have piled away.
I can’t remember exactly and may be making it up, but I have a feeling that Baldur’s Gate and Fallout 2 also got reviewed in that issue.
What a month!
09/07/2009 at 16:00 Kieron Gillen says:
I gave Thief II 89%.
(It’s always worth remembering that Vanilla Thief II pre-Patch was a bit of a mess. As in, levels were missing a mass of furniture, etc)
BG got reviewed in the same issue – it was quite the month for finding our Lou Reeds at PCG. I believe Fallout 2 may have been the month before or something.
Spectrum vs C64: C64s were for the Rich kids so got wanky tedious games. Spectrums were brought by PUNK ROCK WARRIORS.
KG
KG
09/07/2009 at 16:05 clive dunn says:
KG FTW
09/07/2009 at 16:09 cullnean says:
@KG
SWINE!!
my C64 was second hand with 8 shoe boxes worth of games, that was one fell of a motherfuckin deal.
and could also be used to attack burglars effectivly while using the tape deck as a morning star unlike your puny spectrums.
plus biege is the future of games.
09/07/2009 at 16:28 JonFitt says:
Speccys were technologically inferior, there’s no denying it.
But they were the plucky ragamuffin band of misfits, who solved the clues and found the treasure.
The C64s were the rich kids who got everything they wanted, but had no soul and ultimately lost the girl to the Speccy.
09/07/2009 at 16:37 cullnean says:
lord have mercy on these poor misguided soul’s taking solace in their inferior spectrums
and lest we forget dear lord we had the almighty SID sound chip which allowed me to listen to sweet tunes to go with better graphics while the Sinclair bunch smoked fags and talked girls in to letting them touch them with their wildeian wit behind the bike shed.
im still doing this fanboi thing wrong.
09/07/2009 at 16:56 JonFitt says:
Wot Kieron said. I should refresh before typing comments.
@Kieron Gillen
It may have been your review of Thief that put me off buying it. The later parts with zombies and tosh was not what I was looking for. I wanted to sneak into houses and steal stuff. So I played the demo repeatedly instead.
09/07/2009 at 16:58 clive dunn says:
There is probably something deeply wrong with a 8 year old boy playing Ant Attack 3D whilst listening to his dads King Crimson tapes being loudly distorted due to over-eager azimuth adjustments.
09/07/2009 at 17:03 Ergates says:
@KG: Didn’t you write for AP under the moniker of “Cookie Monster”? Which would make Theif the first review published under your real name?
I vaguely remember that UFO review too. No specific details as such, but it’s always the most glowing and most critical reviews that stick in the memory.
The most obvious influence the Hobbit had on me, was that if anyone ever sits down next to me and starts singing about gold I’m forced to kill them instantly.
09/07/2009 at 17:28 Paul Moloney says:
Spectrum = three-chord punk
Commodore = wanky prog rock
Amstrad = incontinent folk music
09/07/2009 at 18:29 HopperUK says:
I’ve been a MUSH roleplayer since I discovered the things existed while at university in 1998. Though I just hang out with a couple of friends now, since I discovered (after far too long) that everyone on the internet is completely insane.
It’s fun watching things like WoW roleplayers go through the same internal dramas and stupidity that we did in the late 90s though. Never did play on a Transformers MUSH. Comic books all the way for me.:)
09/07/2009 at 18:49 Kieron Gillen says:
Ergates: Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say that, but realised it opened a whole other can of worms so decided to side-step it.
KG
09/07/2009 at 19:55 Ergates says:
You’d have thought I’d have learned to spell the name of what is probably my favourate game ever by now….
“I” before “E” except after “C”…
09/07/2009 at 22:17 Alex says:
I have stopped reading this halfway through to add: “WOO! CANNOCK!”
10/07/2009 at 00:51 Hazard says:
Wow… when I saw that TF2005 MUSH login screen my face just about melted off. It’s like someone finally acknowledged that my secret hobby for 12 years is actually.. you know, a real thing!
Kieron is right, 2k5 is still going strong and hell, we’ve even upgraded the combat system. I’ve been playing there forever, I’d be curious to know who you played there Kieron. :)
As for some of the other comments; yeah it is mostly about friends and a big nerdy chatroom, but there is some amazing roleplaying that goes on. Some structured, some not. Way better than most of the messageboard junk that I have seen. I won’t shamelessly plug, but you can google around for the wiki and check out any number of logs going back 12 years or so.
If anyone is curious, hit up Hazard when you get there.
10/07/2009 at 01:13 Sunder2k5 says:
Yeah, the 2k5 MUSH is still going strong. We also have a wiki page, for all your needs and instructions on how/where to log on and how to apply. New players are always welcome!
http://transformers2005.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
MUSHing is like helping to write a big story. :)
10/07/2009 at 01:24 Tom Davidson says:
I played a lot of MUSHes. Practically destroyed my college career with ‘em, actually. When I hear about people getting addicted to WoW nowadays, I think, “Sonny boy, I did that back when you were lucky to have ANSI color.”
I remember my elation the first time I was given a ROYALTY flag. My introduction to procedural code through @ commands, and the creation of silly things like hand mirrors that would show you other people’s @desc statements. I went to CWRU in the early ’90s, meaning that I was involved in TinyM* back in the day; from there, I made my way to a number of others.
That said, the all-time time-waster for me turned out to be a MUD after all, albeit a very MUSH-like MUD: DiscworldMUD, which as I understand it is still around.
10/07/2009 at 01:28 ACS says:
@Kieron
I’m interested in the Geoff Tuffli thing for several reasons. First off, he was incredibly good at setting design, and was responsible for three of the best original-themed RPG MUSHes out there: Pandemonium, HellMUSH II, and Gohs. I’m pretty sure he was involved in some others, but the setting design was pretty immaculately done.
Also, unlike most gods, he did most (or all) of the code himself. I think he may actually have been the only admin on Gohs.
Second, I’m largely just interested to see how a MMORPG designed by MUSH people differs from an MMORPG designed by MUD people. Though I suspect the majority of people involved in the design of Champions are MUD people (or actually probably MMORPG people), there’s a chance that story isn’t going to end up an afterthought, and that systems designed to [i]support[/i] storytelling might actually exist.
I’m not confident that the graphical medium is well-suited to all that, but interested to see what they come up with.
10/07/2009 at 10:22 Kieron Gillen says:
Hazard: That’s a dark secret. Mail me and I’ll probably say. I suspect I played longer over at Lost Years with the alt. An OC, a Decepticon. Oh – and I briefly played Sunstreaker at 2k5 too, except it never really worked that well. I played him particularly sociopathic.
Sunder2k5: I admit, when going to look at the site, I had a bit of a glow at seeing the timeline – seeing where I’d play up to, and the events afterwards which I only really could guess at the full import. It’s a big ol’ story.
Tom: Ditto. My time on the MUSHes is, I suspect, why I don’t go completely into modern MMOs. I’ve disappeared down that hole once before.
KG
10/07/2009 at 11:59 Demon Beaver says:
For some reason all I can see on the Transformers title screenshot is “TRANSFORMERS BOOB MUSH”
10/07/2009 at 15:48 Tom Camfield says:
Re: UFO A500, I hand copied that review onto the internet years ago when I had an AP tribute site and things like scanners were a disfunctional mess. It’s become a part of my history; that obsessive time in the years after APs demise when I’d lost direction and argued continuously on alt.digitiser and the like.
11/07/2009 at 21:46 Wisq says:
My time with MUSHes (mainly of the comic book superhero/villain roleplay variety) ended mainly when it became clear that most of the current places were (a) running out of players, and (b) all turned to crap by their administrators.
On many places, the application requirements were getting excessive, requiring you to write a whole massive document (upwards of 100k!) on everything your character can ever do, get it approved by staff, then be held precisely to that document for your entire playing time (unless you submit any equally detailed amendments to it).
The stated goals here were to let other people know what you can do, to ensure you’re serious about playing the character, and most importantly, to weed out the “twinks”, or “powergamers”. These were players who messed up the otherwise harmonious consent-based roleplay (you tell me what you’re trying to do to my character, I decide whether it succeeds or not) by always having to get their way — perhaps by overstating their powers, or by always being insanely lucky, or by even just pulling new powers out their arse.
The trouble was the sinister agenda behind these applications. The real goal, even if staff didn’t consciously realise it, was to have a document that they could beat players over the head with should they stray (purely in the eyes of staff, of course), and even more importantly, to force players to invest heavily in their characters, so that staff have leverage over them right from the start.
(Nor did the applications weed out twinks. Ironically, it actually made them worse, because now they had more ammunition with which to achieve their power fantasies or whatever goes on in their heads.)
Worse, I was part of staff on several occasions, and even found myself slipping into the same mindset as all my fellow clique-y staffers, believing that our job was to be bouncers and police rather than administrators and facilitators. Thankfully, my specialty was code and my position always either codewiz or hosting provider, so I don’t have any real instances of player abuse to look back upon in shame — though I did partake in some of the behind-the-scenes grumbling about players the staff didn’t want around any more, and were looking for reasons to get rid of.
So yeah, I pretty much have to agree with HopperUK that I stopped roleplaying on MUSHes around when I discovered that “everyone on the internet is completely insane”. I do still hang out on a few, but only for chatting with old friends. I don’t really see myself getting into that scene again, especially since the superhero MUSHes don’t seem to have retained their player counts to anywhere near the degree of e.g. the aforementioned Transformers MUSH.
22/07/2009 at 22:28 PF says:
I loved me some MUSHes, but thankfully they never did anything worth mentioning to my life. (Outside of giving me an excuse to write, anyway.) I could never stay interested in one more than a month or so.
And there were always crazy people. Never bothered me much, but still. Ewww.