Hackers, by Steven Levy is a great book, and has an entire chapter on the creation of Spacewar. The entire book is online, and here is a link to the spacewar chapter.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/mmdd/SiliconValley/Levy/Hackers.1984.book/Chapter3.html Edward Franks wrote: > > On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 05:26 PM, Jim Leonard wrote: > [Snip > > You've presented some strong arguments and I'm going to have to think > > about > > them before coming up with a rebuttal. But first let me pose some > > situations > > and questions: > > > > 1. Adventure was the first computer game, yes? > > Nope. :) Space War was (circa 1960). MIT students meet the PDP-1 > and the cathode-ray tube. > > > It was not an RPG. So > > computer adventure games came before computer RPGs, right? > > Yes. However, adventure games came from pen-n-paper RPGs. From the > _first_ pen-n-paper RPG to be exact which started a whole new game > genre. The reason I'm pointing stuff out that is outside computer > games is that in the case of Adventure there is no prior computer game > influences for it. You have to look outside of computer games to see > what the influences/lineages was. > > > 2. The Adventure genre encompasses *all* fantasy-style gaming. So RPG > > fits > > into it, yes? If not, why? > > No, because you you can have non-fantasy based RPGs. Wasteland and > Fallout for example. (I'm assuming that you are using the term fantasy > to mean the generic pseudo-medieval Tolkien-esque settings.) > > Like with fantasy, one of the problems with the word adventure is that > it can mean a very, very broad category. So broad that it can become > meaningless. (Role-playing has the same problem as you are basically > playing a role in every game.) > > In fact, if you wanted to you could view the SSI Gold Box crpgs > en-masse as the RPG system and each individual game as a particular > adventure. This would have a nice correspondence to the pen-n-paper > world where the rules are the RPG and each module is the adventure. > But this is really more having on an adventure rather than playing an > "adventure" game. :) Darn those multiple word meanings. > > -- > > Edward Franks > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to > the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' > Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/swcollect@oldskool.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/swcollect@oldskool.org/
