Were you a budding computer geek in the mid 1980’s? Deadly Hippos has an interview with Philip Bouchard, one of the designers of the immortal Apple II game Oregon Trail. Good stuff that really brings back memories… If you get similarly overcome with nostalgia, you can bust out the emulator and play it–just don’t blame me when your office productivity spirals off into oblivion as you re-master your buffalo hunting skills.
- Mood:nostalgic
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You know, they still make LOGO. I am totally buying a copy for my kid.
oh, wooooooooow… I forgot about Logo!
In middle school, we had a little robot holding a marker than you could plug into an Apple, and you plopped it down on giant sheets of paper and controlled it with Logo. I though it was like, the coolest thing ever.
We had a LOGO-driven robot in our elementary school gifted program… Totally sweet. The thing looked a bit like a public ashtray–a stubby, slender, black cylinder of a guy, with little bits and pieces arrayed radially about it. Little grilles concealed the distance sensors, so it could react to obstacles and such. Pretty fun to play with.
And for the record, I got about halfway through Oregon Trail this morning before we had to depart downtown for our company party thing. I had forgotten how good it felt to hunt buffalo, and the joys of seeing messages like “inadequate grass” or “asdf has a broken leg” (inevitably followed two or three days later by the same message; I always wondered if injured settlers were really that stupid, clumsy, or unlucky)… And damn, what’s with the thief who kept stealing all my clothes? I’ve got oxen, spare parts, food, bullets, all kinds of cool crap, but nooooo, it’s always “a thief steals 8 sets of clothing”.
uh… though I was using an Apple up until my junior year of high school, I never got around to playing Oregon Trail. Sounds fun. I’ll have to peek at the emulator.
(Though also in middle school, I seem to remember a pen-and-paper game of some sort that sounds like this, that a class of mine was playing for about a week. I wonder if it was related?)