A meander into the digital past

Now that I’ve got an actual audioblog, the real question is: what do I do with it? Ordinarily, it would be the continuation of the same blog it has been, just with audio in addition to the text. Unfortunately, that would only create the audioblog equivalent of a deserted main street, complete with randomly generated tumbleweeds. I registered this domain name quite some time ago, and hadn’t done a whole lot with it. Mostly because I registered this domain name to be my personal writing blog, and then promptly realized that I really should focus more on publishing, so I created RadioPulp.com. Which I also haven’t done as much with as I’d like.

So, I’m not sure if this audioblog will be more of a music blog, an update on my work blog, a writing blog… maybe some bastard child of all three.

I’ll start off with a bit of a non-sequitor. While procrastinating when I should have been looking for voice actors and a producer to help get my business of the ground, I found and reinstalled several old adventure games. I think a part of me wanted to look to another medium to brush up on snappy dialogue and how to best work in musical cues that help the atmosphere of a piece. Yeah, I’ll go with that.

Mostly, though, it was sheer nostalgia. These were the games of my childhood. While everyone else I grew up with had parents wealthy enough to buy them not just a Nintendo, but when the console wars of Sega vs. Super Nintendo flared up, I was unaware of the conflict, because most of the people I knew had both. My family, however, was not particularly well off. We never quite fell below the poverty line, but my parents spent most of their money just keeping a roof over our heads in a decent neighborhood. We never had the newest clothes, we didn’t have an allowance, and we only got to have a birthday party with all of our friends every other year, because my parents just couldn’t afford to throw a big party for all five kids every year. And you know what, I was fine with that. I didn’t care about having the newest, coolest things. I had my books, and I was happy.

But eventually, times changed. The typewriter my mother used to do extra work out of the home was no longer enough. So my parents scrimped and saved and bought a Tandy 1000 tl/2. For those who recall the era of IBM clones, Tandy was Radio Shack’s personal computer line. It had its own slightly modified version of DOS installed, and it could run any DOS programs that a computer with 640k of RAM and an 8 megahertz processor could run. But it had a few interesting proprietary features. For one, it had an extra operating system on top of DOS, much like an early version of Windows. Just without the… windows.

I have fond memories of using the simple music program to write three instrument pieces of music, because it used the proprietary Tandy 3-voice soundcard, so the sound quality was excellent, but it couldn’t do full 16 voice MIDI. Every school paper and bad attempt at doing a homebrewed role playing game sourcebook from elementary to high school was done on the word processor built into that machine. And, while I can’t explicitly recall doing so, I’m fairly certain at some point in time I drew boobs on the simple drawing program. In DOS there was GWBASIC, where I learned to code things much more complicated then 10 PRINT “Hello World”.

One day, my parents had enough money to let me buy a video game. And that’s when fate stepped in to help steer my life. Forever.

You see, I grew up watching Indiana Jones and Star Wars. And I mean that literally, our VHS library was relatively slim pickings, and we didn’t have cable. The bombastic John Williams soundtrack was what first fueled my interest in music, and the modern remakes of the pulp classics of Spielberg and Lucas’ childhood were what informed my taste in such pulp. Needless to say, the last time I’d stood wide-eyed in the local Babbages, I’d caught a glimpse of Indy’s familiar hat and whip on the cover of one of the boxes. So the decision was simple. I’d played the mediocre Temple of Doom NES game at a friend’s house. The one for computer had to be at least that good, right?

And that is where I was both right and wrong, because you see, the thing that my childish mind had missed, was that there were two Indiana Jones games on the shelf at the same time. What I had taken to be alternate covers for the same Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade game were in fact the covers to two separate games. One was a less than stellar sidescroller, just as mediocre as the NES game, and equally frustrating for a small child. The other was one of LucasArts early adventure games.

Unsure as to whether the two games were one and the same, I weighed the boxes in my hand. One felt heavier than the other. The artwork looked less action packed, but much more immersive and cinematic. Finally, I decided that if I was going to play mindless sidescrolling action, I could do it on Nintendo at a friends’ house. I wanted adventure.

I chose… wisely. When we got home, we found that the game came with its own version of Henry Jones Sr.’s grail diary. It had cool decoder card to use as copy protection. And the game, while frustrating at times, was just as amazing and immersive as I’d hoped. I also didn’t know at the time, but on my computer it was even better. Why? Because despite its limitations, the Tandy 3-voice was a technological marvel. To this day, I can’t play the game on ScummVM, an emulator for adventure games. Because the general MIDI sounds so horrible compared to the memories I have of it that I have to use a DOS emulator that has a built in Tandy 3-voice soundcard emulator.

It turns out that my parents had unknowingly chosen wisely too.

My love of adventure games grew. I could play beat-em-ups and sidescrollers at my friends’ houses. Adventure games were all for me. My entire family loved the game. The kids would play it during the day, and my parents would play it at night, each of us keeping our separate save game files. We’d compete, to see who could get farther. If the winning group was feeling charitable, they’d give the losing group hints. These were the days not just before internet walkthroughs, but before the internet.

We didn’t need a Skinner box tempted us with rewards, although every time I heard the triumphant <insert Indiana Jones fanfare here>, I knew that Indy and I had done well.

With a love of LucasArts adventures firmly entrenched, the next game the family bought was The Secret of Monkey Island. Often lauded as literally the best adventure game of all time, it blended pirate action fantasy with a sense of humor that defies description. While the next set of games that I bought, the Space Quest quadrilogy, remains my favorite series of all time, The Secret of Monkey Island is my favorite game of all time.

Over the rest of the 90s, we slowly stocked up on a good portion of both LucasArts and their rival Sierra’s adventure games. My mother, ever the lover of murder mysteries, claimed ownership of Sierra’s Laura Bow series. Being the resident sci-fi nerd of the house after my eldest brother graduated and moved out, the Space Quest series was all mine, and I suspect that the soundtrack to Space Quests 3 and 4 inspired my love of mixing traditional orchestral soundtracks with electronic instruments. After reading the works of Howard Pyle, I was inspired to get my hands on Sierra’s “Robin Hood: Conquests of the Longbow”. The soundtrack, while cheesy in regular MIDI, featured beautiful sounds of strummed lute on the Tandy 3-voice. My love of soundtrack music had expanded to include renaissance music.

When LucasArts rereleased numerous games in packs of several CDs, my family bought the first two. I was exposed to the wonderful jazzy soundtrack and horrible jokes of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, the twisted humor of Day of the Tentacle, where it’s finally safe to microwave hamsters, and I got to follow in Indy’s footsteps again in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

The second pack featured Star Wars games, which, as a fan, of course, I ate up. My older brother was a lover of flight simulators, so I’d already gotten my hands on the X-Wing collectors edition CD-ROM, and the TIE Fighter collector’s edition was in the Star Wars pack. I’m still not entirely sure where my copy of the amazingly immersive adventure game The Dig, which was in the third CD pack that we couldn’t afford at the time, or where my full copy of Dark Forces, which was in the fourth pack, came from. My memory is a bit fuzzy. It’s possible that I found The Dig in a Goodwill somewhere in the early 2000s after I went off to college. Or it’s possible that my stepbrother bought it to test out the new computer he built for himself shortly before he went off to college, then gave it to me when he left. I genuinely don’t remember. All I know is that I never bought either one in its original box, yet I have the CDs.

Looking at my old CD case, I’m seeing game after game that I somehow managed to get, usually on huge discount. Growing up, I always felt like we had nothing, while the other people in our ‘nice’ neighborhood had everything. And yet, in the midst of that, I discovered an entire genre of games before they faded out of view. A genre that challenged the mind, and was made by people who made it look, feel, and sound amazing. Monkey Island and Space Quest are, quite possibly, the best interactive pulp I’ve ever seen. Their humor, atmosphere, pacing, intelligence, art, and music helped form my tastes and abilities. It’s been more than twenty years since I first clicked a mouse to tell Indiana Jones what to do next. But the triumphant fanfare is still with me.