The Agency: Razor One, Main Gameplay Screen
April, the year 2000. The COBOL-powered machines that still ran the world had just weathered the storm of the millennium’s crossing over. The first Xbox was more than a year away. And I was eighteen years old, hard at work learning how to write code for video games. Doesn’t that sound sterile to you? It does to me. “Coding games”. “Game programming”.”
Yuck.
It sounded just as bad to me back then, even though I knew it was my only chance to do what I’d always dreamed of – don the metaphorical articulated trumpet, cymbal hat, and bass-drum backpack belonging to the one-man band of game design and coding together, just as I knew my predecessors had done.
Sometime during the spring break of my freshman year at Digipen Institute of Technology – my Alma mater and my only claim to any academic prowess – I had a years-long romance with text-based game design and coding. Maybe it was because text output was the technical limitation I’d started with (Ed Fries, by the way, has a nice piece about the merits of designing for constraints), or perhaps it was a ZZT-laden nostalgic stumble (Tim Sweeney, too, has his own thoughts on design limitations) that left me collapsed, dead-drunk in ASCII alley.
