It's not completely new to me, this programming lark. When I
was little we had a 48K Sinclair Spectrum, a small black box with funky rubber keys and a
disconcerting habit of buzzing loudly when the power was on. Like the definitive 8-bit
home computer it was, the Spectrum didn't have a monitor - you plugged it into your
television and tuned into it like a long-lost TV channel. Despite my tender years, I could
write really simple stuff in BASIC for the Speccy - one early program I fondly remember
went something like:
10 PRINT " Nick rules the world! ";
20 GOTO 10
If you ran that, the screen would fill with:
Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules
the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules
the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules
the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules the world! Nick rules
the world! Nick rules the world! (etc…)
Cool trick, huh? The zenith of my BASIC skills was a
semi-interactive text adventure based on my then favourite movie 'Aliens'. Rather like
those equally 80's 'Choose Your Own Adventure Books', each screen of text ended with two
choices. If you chose wisely, you survived and made it a little further through the game.
If you chose the blatantly wrong option (i.e. 'Do you peer a little closer at the burning
acid dripping from above?'), you died each time in a suitably painful, hideous and
blood-curdling fashion. Even worse, you had to listen to my appalling 'end-of-game' music
(with accompanying morbid black screen).
I guess, looking back, I always wanted to program a proper game…