Nirrad’s Labyrinth

When I was a freshman in college, my first computer game was published.  Coincidentally, when I was a freshman in college, my last computer game was published.  Which is, in other words, to say that when I was a freshman in college, the ONE time a computer game I had written was published.

At that time I was writing in BASIC (which stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).  I’d been writing my own games and programs for three years or so when I submitted this game for publication.  At that time, the best forum for publishing your own game, especially for the Commodore 64 or the VIC-20 was in a magazine called Compute! or its sister publication Compute Gazette!  Each month that magazine would publish a number of games from users.  I would dutifully type them in manually then debug them (because my typing would almost inevitably introduce transcription errors) and then play them.  From that process as well as looking at the source of other games and programs, I learned programming.  I should say “learned” programming because while I could write software that did (more or less) what I wanted, the quality of the software was … questionable.  I haven’t looked at the source in many years but my recollection is that if one were to build a flowchart of my program it would be the very definition of spaghetti code.  If you don’t program, spaghetti code, like spaghetti, is a pile of intention that gets tangled and hard to follow as pieces of it move around and through other pieces making it difficult to follow and prone to issues.

But, for all of that I had written a game.  It’s not a complicated game.  I called it “Nirrad’s Labyrinth”.  Note the clever reversing of my first name as  a way to get myself in to title.  No lack of hubris there…  In truth, as I remember it, I think my brother James helped me come to the name before I sent it in.

It was a simple game that built a (random) maze in memory.  The player, represented by an 8×8 pixelated knight, was supposed to go from the (S)tart of the maze to the (F)inish of the maze collecting treasure and then escape.  But, I introduced several twists.  First, at the start you couldn’t see the walls.  In fact, the only way you could see the walls was to run in to them.  So, the walls would slowly, over time, be revealed as the player ran in to them randomly.  Second, for each treasure on the screen there was a trapdoor.  Hit a trapdoor and you’d randomly be dropped somewhere else on the screen.  The location was random, so hit the same trapdoor and you would end up on a different spot than the last time you hit that trapdoor.  In retrospect, what that had to do with a trapdoor versus a teleporter is unclear.  Teleporter would have been better.  Finally, there was the motivation to move quickly.  That was the Boogens.  He was another 8×8 pixelated character and he was a monster.  He randomly hopped about the board.  If he landed on you, *BOOM* you were dead.  End of game, do you want to play again?  Oh, and there were also random blips and bloops for sound representing the various move sounds, hitting a wall, getting a treasure, getting teleported, etc.  You operated the player via an 8-direction joystick plugged in to the joystick port.  It probably also supported keyboard, but honestly I don’t recall.

Certainly it was not a complicated game.  I had also written it to run on both the computers I had access to at the time, a Vic-20 and a Commodore-64, both of the computers that were targets of Compute! and Compute Gazette!

Also, it had to be small enough to fit in the amount of memory each computer had for programs, so this did not have fancy animations or even sprites.  It was simply character mapping via peeks and pokes (two methods to either look at a place in memory or to put something in to a place in memory).

In the summer of my senior year in high school I sent the program in to the magazine.  I don’t recall that I had high hopes for it, but I’m optimistic by nature so I figured I had nothing to lose.

Much to my surprise, in October of my freshman year in college I got a letter from Compute! indicating they wanted to buy the rights to publish my game.  Instead of publishing it in a monthly magazine, which had been my target, they wanted to publish it in a book of games and programs called “COMPUTE!’s Commodore Collection – Volume 2”.  This was very exciting to me because I’d never had anything published before!  More importantly, they were going to pay me cash money for it!  I was going to be a published author and I was going to get paid for it.  Life was good.

One might imagine that the publishing rights for such a sophisticated pieces of software, so tuned and well balanced, so replayable and, frankly, amazing might be measured in the tens to hundreds of thousands.  Well, that person would be so very, very wrong.

I was offered and happily accepted $625 for the rights to publish my game.  And, on top of that, I was offered residuals which would mean they’d send me MORE money for each book sold.

At this point I’m an 18-year old and I don’t have access to anyone to review the contract or tell me whether it was good or bad.  Or to suggest perhaps I could negotiate on anything.  Nope.  Just me.  So, I signed it because of two simple things.  First, I’d be a PUBLISHED AUTHOR!  Second, they would pay me to be a PUBLISHED AUTHOR!  The rest of it was just details.  So, I signed it.

They shipped me a check and the only thing I can recall doing with that, though I’m probably safe in assuming that I also bought lots of junk food, was to buy pizza for my wing of the dorm (probably no more than 4-6 pizzas).

Over time I also received a couple hundred more dollars as a result of sales of the book.  I want to say that I saw sales figures and it sold maybe a few thousand copies.  Oh! and as an author, I have a copy at home on my shelf which I received gratis because, you know, I’M IN IT!

Not long after that the publishing model for COMPUTE! and the Gazette changed and started trailing off pretty dramatically.  Brought on, in part, by the advent of the Internet.  And the fact that folks got REALLY tired of typing in their own programs.  So my game got published kind of in the sweet spot for that time and I’m fortunate for that.

Growing up I imagined that I might write, much like the authors I read and loved like Heinlein and Asimov.  That didn’t turn out to be my route.  Instead I wrote software and software has been good to me.  It’s helped buy houses, raise kids, go on vacations and given me a freedom to live a good life and provide for my family in the way I’d always hoped.  So, while that game at that point in my life may be the only time I’m published as an author, whether in software or prose, that’s okay.  Writing has turned out to be my career and it’s been something that’s allowed me to have the life I have and for that I’m thankful.