A Lesson In Archaic Video Game History

Due to an Act of Dog, I will be purchasing a new computer in the near future, as my laptop has been rendered damaged beyond repair. If I am lucky, I might be able to get fifty bucks for a machine I paid a thousand dollars for less than a year ago. It appears that I may have to wait until at least September to purchase a new computer. The new model of the iMac is expected to make its debut on August 31st. Rumor sites speculate the new model will have wireless mice and keyboards (that means built-in Bluetooth), a G5 processor and a case redesign. Other specifications are sketchy at best. I expect the "I want it" factor will be high in this model, especially if the price point is comparable to the prices of today's G4 iMacs. I hope the larger displays will stick with the new models; there is not enough workspace on a 1024 x 768 monitor resolution. And to think we used to work on 640 x 480 pixel resolution.

I have recently expanded my (small) collection of musical instruments. I recently purchased an acoustic bass guitar and have been teaching myself to play it. My playing still sounds like crap, but I'm having a great time nonetheless. I must admit, that my improvement is commendable over the last couple weeks that I have been playing it. Now that I am involved in this Grease thing, I often have to make a choice if I should spend my time practicing the bass, or the drums.

I thought I might discuss a bit of video game history with you, as I have been doing some research on the history of Role-Playing Computer Games. It seems that I may have been mistaken if I had stated that NetHack was the first computer-based RPG. NetHack may be many things, but it certainly wasn't the first.

NetHack enjoys a certain phenomenon that a playable version exists in for nearly every possible computer platform. Not only that, but each port is nearly identical in features. It is also a game that has not only survived, but also thrived over fifteen years. Many video games are popular for a couple years, but are then forgotten when a new 'flavor of the month' emerges. The other great thing about NetHack, is that the code is open-source, and the game is distributed free. Finally, we cannot hesitate to mention the size. Fully compressed, a version of NetHack can almost fit on one 1.44 MB floppy disk. I think the last game I played that fit on a disk that size was Dark Castle.

While reading up on NetHack documentation, I ended up discovering that NetHack was based on an older game called Rogue. I do not know much about Rogue, except that it was a Dungeon-esque Role Playing Game that used ASCII characters or tiles for graphics. Rogue apparently, is still around, and enjoys a rather small cult following.

In the depths of my web searching, I discovered that Rogue was based on another program. It was based on a game called the Sword of Fargoal written around 1982 by Jeff McCord for the Commodore 64 and Vic-20 systems. The Sword of Fargoal was an incredibly popular game at the time; and a game that I certainly enjoyed. It was a difficult game, which took hours to play -- and if you were very lucky, you might have found the Sword, and managed to make it out of the Dungeon alive.

I had managed to stumble on Jeff McCord's personal webpage, and read his personal accounts of the game. It appears that he based the Sword of Fargoal on an older game he wrote in his High School Computer Science class called "Gammaquest II" written entirely in BASIC on the now archaic Commodore PET. I would possibly consider Gammaquest II to be the impetus of the whole Role-Playing phenomenon because of one distinguishing feature: Gammaquest II had an algorithm that would randomly generate dungeon levels, and the dungeon would be revealed piece-by piece as the player explored. This seems to be one of the most intriguing features of the NetHack phenom, is that the game is different each time you play it.

The reason why I have been researching these archaic games is simple. First of all, I understand how a character is generated in a Role-Playing Game such as Dungeons & Dragons. I have an understanding of rudimentary statistics, the rules of chance and probability, and their applications in a role-playing game situation. What I am interested in, is how the computer randomly generates a gameplay map, places items, monsters of varying difficulty, treasures, etc.

I am not going to profess that I can design a better mousetrap. Nor do I wish to distribute someone else's intellectual property. All I would like to do is learn a bit about programming and designing a NetHack-like game is the only thing I would want to program.

Picking a language to program the game is another difficult matter altogether. Do I write in Java, so it can run on all platforms? Do I program in C? Visual Basic? Or do I program in some Mac OSX native utility?

This could be a massive undertaking for someone who has so little time to even write in his blog.

By the way, I used to love playing that old NetHack-like game "Dungeon of Doom" for the old 680x0-based Macs. I played that game for countless hours. Only rescued the Orb once.