An Ode to Ye Olde Computer Games | #211
An unlikely inspiration for Kota Factory 👉
Hello internet friends,
If you’re a 90’s (or early 2000s kid) you might have experienced the sheer novelty of playing a game on a computer. Yep, just having access to a Personal Computer was a luxury and if you’re one of the lucky few who had one (or had friends who had one), the first thing you’d do was to use Webshots to change the desktop wallpaper, and then look at the 3D pipes screensaver. Once all that was done, you’d load up a computer game and play for hours with no pop-up notifications to distract you.
This week’s newsletter is a hattip to ye olde computer games you might have played, one pixel at a time.
Things we learnt this week 🤓
Raise your hands if the first game you ever played was Prince of Persia 🖐
This legendary game was created by Jordan Mechner and released in 1989. He used 6502 assembly, a low level programming language to make the game. For those of you of who studied assembly programming in university, you will know what a difficult task this is. He used rotoscoping for the character movements, using his younger brother as a model. He also used inspirations from Hollywood for some of the animations including the final duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone from The Adventures of Robin Hood to create the game's sword fighting mechanic. Check out this video (uploaded by Mechner himself) on some of the footage he rotoscoped.One of the people that was inspired after playing Prince of Persia (and Mechner’s earlier game Karateka) was John Romero - the legendary co-founder of id Software and designer of Wolf 3D, Doom, Quake and many more. He also coined the multiplayer term "deathmatch". While Wolf, Doom, Quake et al achieved worldwide popularity, many of us wore out our keyboards playing this John Romero-created game called Dangerous Dave or simply Dave. One of the reasons for the game’s popularity in India and Pakistan is that Dave.exe came pre-installed on PCs when you bought them so everyone in that era played the game. In fact, John Romero told the author of this newsletter (yes, me!) that he once got an invite to speak at a conference hosted in India and the invite letter was addressed to “Mr John Romero, creator of games such as Dave” and that was it! No mention of Wolf, Doom and Quake. Dave 4 Eva!
Can you hear the jumping sound effect in this gif? Cause we can XYZZY SPOON - If these words mean anything to you, we can definitely be friends. Oh what the heck, we can be friends either way 🤝
Some of y’all might recognize this combination of letters as the cheat code to this game called Road Rash. While the first version of the game was released in 1991 for the Sega Genesis, the most popular one (and the ones we probably played) was the 1994 edition developed by Electronic Arts for the PC and was ubiquitous on Indian PCs (we have no idea why!) The game, definitely trying to capture the zeitgeist, included a soundtrack featuring bands such as Soundgarden, Monster Magnet and Therapy? Little did we know that compulsively playing this game would prepare us for modern-day Bangalore traffic.
From IWTK, with love 💌
Can you guess which Hollywood film inspired Kota Factory to be in black and white?
Only In India 🇮🇳
Maybe his flight was just reallly delayed.
<3 IWTK