Hey, remember me? My name’s Wil, and I used to write about geek stuff once a week. Well, now I’m doing it once a month. It’s good to be back.

My extremely active imagination was forged in the playground fire of a childhood spent weak and strange. I read books while other kids played football; I played and wrote computer games while other teens went to makeout parties. While I couldn’t get to second base on the kickball field at school or in Justine Baker’s house, by the end of middle school I had taken the One Ring to Mordor, destroyed the Death Star, and designed and populated countless dungeons.

The real world was a pretty miserable place for a kid like me. I did everything I could to find ways to step out of it: one page at a time in a book or one quarter at a time in the arcade, the more immersive the game, the better. I was never a huge fan of Battlezone’s gameplay, but it remains the closest I’ve ever come to actually driving a tank. I always favored the sit-down versions of games like Pole Position, Spy Hunter, and Sinistar. They felt more . . . real . . . than their stand-up brothers, providing a cleaner escape from the kids at Pinball Plus who took pitiless joy in pointing out that my shoes were Traxx from Kmart, not Vans from the mall.

While game designers and arcade owners did all they could with cabinet systems and sound design (I defy anyone to tell me they didn’t want their Slush Puppy “shaken, not stirred” after a particularly rousing round of Spy Hunter, with music blasting behind their heads, their feet jammed down on the gas, and imagined breezes blowing through their feathered hair), it was our imagination that did most of the work of creating the alternate reality, especially on our console systems at home.

The earliest video games didn’t just encourage us to use our imaginations when we played them, they forced us to. Yar’s Revenge, the best-selling original title on the Atari 2600, has simple yet entertaining gameplay, but it was supported by an extraordinarily rich backstory, turning it into one chapter in an epic struggle for cosmic justice. When I was 9, I wasn’t just chipping away at the shield while I readied my Zorlon cannon; I was helping the Yar extract revenge on the Qotile for the destruction of their planet, Razak IV, as illustrated in the comic that came with the game.

When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot. I flipped the power on, picked up the joystick, and booted up my imagination as I sat in the command chair of my very own space ship. For the next hour, I was a member of the Atarian Starship Fleet. I was all that stood between the Zylon Empire and the destruction of humanity. Through my cockpit’s viewscreen (developed at great expense by the RCA corporation back on Earth) I blasted Zylon starships and Zylon basestars, and I would have defeated them all, if my meddling mother hadn’t made me stop and eat dinner!

Over the years, I built bigger and better immersive environments for myself, using transistor radios and walkie-talkies to complete a cockpit with a Vectrex as the main viewer. I made maps of whatever jungle I explored as Pitfall Harry and hung them on my bedroom walls. I created star charts and galactic maps for everything from Asteroids to Cosmic Ark. When I copied game programs out of Antic magazine, I dimmed the lights and did it in the dark, because that seemed like something real hackers would do. (This probably explains a rash of headaches suffered by real hackers throughout the ’80s and ’90s.)

In 1984, after cutting my teeth on the Atari 400 and TI-99/4A, I got my first Macintosh computer. While it had word processing and drawing ability like nothing I’d seen up to that point in my life, it didn’t have any real games, and its programming environment was confounding to the point of uselessness. There wasn’t enough combined imagination in the world to make MacVegas fun, especially when my friends with Commodores and PCs could show off a game like King’s Quest. I was despondent.

My disappointment softened when I discovered Macventure games by ICOM Simulations: DeJa Vu in 1985, Uninvited in 1986, and Shadowgate in 1987. While these games weren’t as technologically advanced or immersive as some in the arcades, they gave me access to worlds that were richer than the ones I’d visited before. They felt less linear, less finite, and engaged my imagination in ways I hadn’t felt since I built my first Atarian Starship in our living room so many years before. And when I finished them, I got a diploma that I could print out – slowly – on my dot-matrix Imagewriter.

As I grew older and came of age in the ’80s, I looked to gaming more for stimulation and entertainment than for escape. I was still attracted to immersive environments, though, and loved games like Defender of the Crown and NeTrek. Around 1988 or 1989, an unlikely game captured my imagination and transported me to another world like nothing had before. Maybe it’s because I was such a huge geek, maybe it’s because I’d been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was in fourth grade, or maybe it’s because I was working on Star Trek every day and my imagination was constantly in an excited state, but Infocom’s The Lurking Horror completely pulled me into its virtual world. It was just green text on a black background, and there wasn’t even any sound, but I was Flynn to its MCP. I spent hours – okay, days – exploring G.U.E. Tech and the nightmares therein. My imagination took the words and created something scary and real. I had finally found the totally immersive game I’d been looking for my entire life in my fragile eggshell mind, where I got to control everything from the sound of a floor waxer to the darkness of the steam tunnels. After I finished it, I played every interactive fiction title I could get my hands on, from Zork to Leather Goddesses of Phobos to Planetfall to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (I think I’ll get over Macho Grande before I get over my inability to capture the babelfish without using Invisiclues™.)

My kids live in a very different world than I did. Their immersive, narrative gaming experiences are the space shuttle to my paper airplane. Several months ago, I showed my 17-year-old stepson some of the classic Infocom games that I loved when I was his age. After growing up in a world where our Xbox 360 is more powerful than every console I owned in my entire childhood, combined and squared, he could appreciate the historical significance but was otherwise unimpressed. (“This is what gaming was for you? That’s weird.”) I was a little saddened, but it quickly passed. After all, when I was his age, I could only dream of one day putting myself into a living, breathing world like Liberty City. It’s a consequence of progress, I guess, and I’m sure that one day he’ll show my incredulous grandchildren these games he used to play that were confined to a television set. (“You had to use an external console, not a chipslot? That’s weird.”)

As I wrote this column, I got a jones to hop in a bathysphere and spend some time back in Rapture. I already finished Bioshock once, but it wasn’t the plasmids or the music or the visual design that pulled me back; it was the story. It was a desire to experience Andrew Ryan’s world once again, to find every single diary and explore every single room, to feel like I was back under the sea in that incredible place.

I played for several hours one day, discovering some new areas and reliving some half-remembered favorites. I eventually found myself under Sander Cohen’s spotlight, pulled away only when my wife asked me – for what was apparently the third or fourth time – to come to dinner. I saved the game and shut down the console. After we ate, I grabbed my controller, and prepared to go back to Fort Frolic.

What I found was worse than a room filled with Splicers: the dreaded Red Ring of Death. To anyone who doubts the narrative power of modern video games, I submit myself: I felt like I was in the middle of a book, only to have it ripped from my hands and thrown into a fire. I felt like I was watching a movie, only to have the film catch and burn through somewhere in the fourth reel. It was fabula interrupta.

Waiting for my 360 to get back from the gaming doctor and restore my access to Rapture and points beyond isn’t as bad as one might think, though. I still have all my books and movies and hobby games and other nerdly escape routes. And, I confess, I keep a Z Machine interpreter on my Mac, so I’m never too far away from an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

Wil Wheaton imagines there’s no heaven.

I was ten years old in 1982, and came of age at the beginning of the electronic gaming revolution, as toy companies realized there was a lot of allowance to claim if they could bring the arcade gaming experience into our homes and the palms of our hands.

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember some of the totally cool electronic hand held toys we coveted in our youth, like the Digital Daredevil and 3-D Thundering Turbo from Tomy, or Milton Bradley’s straight-from-the-future Microvision – a hand held game gadget that could play different games, just like an Atari or Intellivision! And it only weighed, like, ten pounds! If you were really lucky, maybe you had one of the Coleco games that looked an awful lot like an arcade cabinet. I had Pac-Man, my brother had Galaxian. Sure, they didn’t play as well as their arcade inspirations, but they looked so cool!

There were different games for different types of kids: the competitive kids liked the racing games, the elementary school equivalent of the jocks liked the sports “simulations,” and the nerds like me played the science fiction games.

I never liked the sports games, because I sucked at sports in real life, and video and electronic games were a way to escape from real life into worlds that only existed in imagination. In fact, when I got Star Raiders for my Atari, I built a fort that was actually the bridge of a starship, with the television as the main viewer and a chair from the kitchen as my captain’s chair. When I got my Vectrex, I frequently played it with a blanket draped over my head to block out everything else in the world, so I could pretend I really was sweeping mines in outer space.

Space was the most common “fantastic” setting for games back then, but in the early 80s, the role playing games that we all take for granted today were just beginning to filter down from the mysterious realm of hardcore wargamers into the more familiar surroundings of Toys R Us and Kmart, as the Dungeons & Dragons craze leveled up on a daily basis, (reaching the coveted Saturday Morning Cartoon status in 1983) so it was only natural that the two worlds would collide and create something that I could call my own: the electronic fantasy game.

Most of these games were variations on the basic dungeon-crawling theme, but they were just perfect in an age where imagination was still required to transform the monster that chased you around Atari’s Adventure from a duck into a dragon, and the animated Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit was scary and magnificent. This was a perfect blending of the two things my friends and I loved more than anything else in the world: cool electronic gadgets and the fantasy world we were just discovering.

Today, I look back at a couple of my favorites . . .

Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game
By Mattel
1980
“. . . an electronic game of strategy, imagination, and adventure . . .”



This was a classic dungeon crawl, where one or two players navigated a randomly generated map in search of a single box of treasure while trying to avoid a boodthirsty dragon. The game used sounds to tell you what was going on, like the dragon flying around or the player bumping into a wall, as you and a friend mapped out the ever-changing labyrinth.

This game included really cool lead miniatures, just like the ones the big kids used when they played with paper and dice and listened to Black Sabbath. It combined electronics and traditional board game pieces to create something that was just as fun to play alone as it was to play with a friend. You could even set up different difficulty levels to handicap one player if you wanted.

I didn’t own this game until a few years after it had been released, but once it was added to my inventory, I played it until it broke, which happened before I lost any of the pieces – a rarity in my pre-teen years.

Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game
By Mattel
1981
“Find the magic arrow and shoot the dragon! If your aim is good, you win!”



Ah, how frequently I long for a simpler time when slaying a dragon was as easy as firing a magic arrow with good aim. Or, in this case, left, right, up or down.

Though it was little more than a D&D-branded hand held version of Hunt the Wumpus, this was still a lot of fun for a kid who was willing to use his imagination.

The randomly-generated dungeon was divided into a ten by ten grid, with each space on the grid representing a different room that could hold a deadly and potentially game-ending pit, a monster, or the magic dragon-slaying arrow. The player’s goal was to explore the dungeon, find the magic arrow, and then use it to slay the dragon. Depending on what difficulty you chose, you could start the game with a rope that gave you safe egress from the pits (rendering them annoying instead of game-ending) or the rope could also be randomly hidden somewhere in the dungeon.

Flashing LCD icons told the player what was in an adjacent room, so you could avoid the annoying bats that picked you up and dropped you in a random room, or find the tools you needed to complete the quest.

For all its apparent simplicity, it was really a challenge if played on the higher levels, and because it ran on watch batteries, you’d get bored with it long before they ever ran out of juice. I played this for hours between shots on film sets, though I rarely got good scores, because the game was timed and didn’t have a pause feature. I’d frequently put it down when I was called in to shoot, and come back to discover that my score was the dreaded 99. I think this helped create my philosophy that playing the game and enjoying it was more important than winning.

The Dark Tower
By Milton Bradley
1981



“You’re lost in a forbidding land . . . your warriors are dying . . . food is low. But still you must conqueror THE DARK TOWER!”

I saved my absolute favorite electronic fantasy game for last: a quest that felt epic in scale, that was as much fun to play with friends as it was to play alone. It could even be rendered portable with a little ten year-old ingenuity.

The Dark Tower was a fantasy quest game that pitted players against each other in a race to travel through four different realms, collect three different keys, and retrieve an ancient magic scepter, which had been stolen by a Tyrant King, who was also known as “Sir not appearing in this game.”

The centerpiece of the game, literally and figuratively, was a tall black tower that sat at the center of the board and kept track of players’ progres through the game as they visited crypts and tombs, replenished their food and gold supply at sanctuaries, and battled band after band of evil Brigands. Inside the tower was a small computer and a spinning series of absolutely gorgeous and perfectly-drawn images that showed the players what was going on during the game: when you battled Brigands, an LED display would show you how many warriors you had, along with a picture of them, and then do the same with the brigands. Simple electronic beeps and tunes heightened the excitement as the game unfolded.



While you traveled around the board, you could visit crypts and tombs in search of treasure and keys, and a magic sword which could slay the obligatory dragon. You could visit bazaars and purchase food, additional warriors, or healers and scouts to protect you from plague or getting lost. In multi-player games, you could get a wizard to join your party and use him to curse the other players.

Since I spent so much of my youth on film sets, portability was an important factor in any game, as was the ability to play it alone, since I was frequently the only kid at work. The Dark Tower had a built-in one player option, and if you were willing to draw a copy of the four realms on some notebook paper (I was) then you could just take the tower with you in your backpack, and leave the mundane world of the early 1980s for a magical and dangerous fantasy realm any time, with ease.

Milton Bradley was sued shortly after the game was released, and they stopped producing it. It quickly went out of print, and is highly prized by collectors today. There is a wonderful flash-based version of the game that can be played online . . . but don’t complain to me if you get in trouble for leaving the mundane world of 2007 for a magical and dangerous fantasy realm.

Credits: Computer Fantasy Game image comes from Hand Held Museum dot Com. Computer Labyrinth Game images come from Board Game Geek dot Com, and The Dark Tower images come from Well of Souls dot Com and Google.

Wil Wheaton’s aim is true.