Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to You know you are old when....

Not much has changed.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Years ago (the late 70s), my friend Gary managed to finagle an installation in his apartment of Control Data's PLATO system, a very early online unit designed for educational use, and allowing interaction between various users. The interface was a simple monochrome screen, with vector graphics along the line of the old "Asteroid" game. The gimmick was that the program would download the graphics to the terminal, and then the software could just manipulate the location of the graphic on the screen, allowing more detail than could normally be supported by the crappy modems of the time (you know, the kind where you set the phone in rubber cups?)

Some hotshot had written a game called "Empire," where you could go into a shared environment, and fly Star Trek ships around, shooting at other players and conquering sectors for your "team." All actions were various combinations of keystrokes.

Needless to say, you had to get up pretty early in the morning to beat the 12-year-olds with lightning fingers, never mind possible hackers. The screen didn't move in real time, but changed between fixed images with "regenerations." A fast shooter could move his ship into your field, blow your ass off, and flee off screen between one regeneration and the next. You never saw what hit you.

The light of inspiration hit me back then. What if somebody set up terminals in an arcade? With real controls for interfaces, big screens, and dedicated phone lines? People would pay to do this, and the game would constantly change as new tactics were developed, whereas current games simply involved beating a microchip. I still have the proposal I sent to Bally back then, returned with polite rejection. Maybe I'll reproduce it here sometime.

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