Where is my game……

There is a lot to be said for knowing the market. However what is one to do when the market does not exist? Or worse, when one is much too young to even think about such things.

I wrote a game in 1977. It ran on a mainframe computer. It was incredibly simple by todays standards. The graphics were incredible crude, and were comprised of ASCII characters. It even had crude animation through the use of horizontal and vertical characters.

It was to some extent ahead of its time. There were mainframe games back then. The days of playing adventure games over a dial up connection to a time sharing system did not allow for graphics. So everything was text based. Yet, one could spend hours playing the 4 or 5 games that were buried in the heart of the computer.

What I set out to do, was to make a totally different type of game. One that would combine the text based adventure game with of course violence. Not only did you have to navigate, you also had to take aim, and fire your tank. Of course there were many things that could happen. Your tank might loose a track, you might loose a gun. You may have engine trouble. Simply saying fix engine would get you going again, but in some cases, you would have to steal fuel from the enemy….. I did not know of the Geneva Convention.

In order to create excitement, and to avoid boredom, I tied many of the events to the system clock and calender. So yes, one might often end up in a repeat scenario, but unless you could go back in time, the solution was elusive.

Yet another trick I used was to base some of the events on the persons name and their past playing style. And its not what you would think. I would add up the values of the ASCII character codes in the name, and use that as a seed for the randomizer. Then I would apply a weighting value to the games complexity based upon the past number of times the particular individual had played.

As such, the game was always new and different, even the various levels might shift around. But, the complexity weighting factor was based upon the number of prior plays assigned to the user. In addition, I would throw a wild card in from time to time to simplify a level so as to keep motivation high.

If I had known about business or marketing, perhaps I would have had something. But alas, it was the fun of creating, and playing, not the monetary potential that drove me to create it.

The amazing part, was when I saw MY GAME being played 6 years after I wrote it. Apparently someone liked it, so they ported it to another OS for yet a different mainframe. Still I thought, wow, thats cool, its still around. Now today, all these years later, I would like to have it again….

So, if anyone ever has seen or played the game called XY2X you must tell me about it. I want my game back.