Why the free availability of Unity3D and Unreal Development Kit has me nostalgic for my childhood
Like many skinny boys my age, the first computer book I ever read looked something like this:
Looking back, it's easy to be cynical about these titles. Each book contained a whole selection of games. You'd get a few pages of code (a lot to type on a ZX Spectrum keyboard at the age of 9), virtually no explanation, and a lavish watercolor picture supposed to illustrate the game play. When you'd got the whole game typed in, you'd run it and discover that the game consisted of a few lines of plain text. Most of them didn't even use color. One game I remember was called "Archery". I was excited to type it in -- the watercolor was really stunning for that one. The game play looked like this: . . . .0. . . . . . . The "player" had to quickly hit the number corresponding to the position of the 0 (which was supposed to be an archers head poking out between the turrets of castle). It was thrilling. Being able to write a game myself, I knew I was on the bottom rung of a very long ladder that lead all the way to Jet Set Willy.






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