When I was a freshman in college, my first computer game was published.\u00a0 Coincidentally, when I was a freshman in college, my last computer game was published.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
At that time I was writing in BASIC (which stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).\u00a0 I’d been writing my own games and programs for three years or so when I submitted this game for publication.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 Each month that magazine would publish a number of games from users.\u00a0 I would dutifully type them in manually then debug them (because my typing would almost inevitably introduce transcription errors) and then play them.\u00a0 From that process as well as looking at the source of other games and programs, I learned programming.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But, for all of that I had written a game.\u00a0 It’s not a complicated game.\u00a0 I called it “Nirrad’s Labyrinth”.\u00a0 Note the clever reversing of my first name as\u00a0 a way to get myself in to title.\u00a0 No lack of hubris there…\u00a0 In truth, as I remember it, I think my brother James helped me come to the name before I sent it in.<\/p>\n
It was a simple game that built a (random) maze in memory.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But, I introduced several twists.\u00a0 First, at the start you couldn’t see the walls.\u00a0 In fact, the only way you could see the walls was to run in to them.\u00a0 So, the walls would slowly, over time, be revealed as the player ran in to them randomly.\u00a0 Second, for each treasure on the screen there was a trapdoor.\u00a0 Hit a trapdoor and you’d randomly be dropped somewhere else on the screen.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In retrospect, what that had to do with a trapdoor versus a teleporter is unclear.\u00a0 Teleporter would have been better.\u00a0 Finally, there was the motivation to move quickly.\u00a0 That was the Boogens.\u00a0 He was another 8×8 pixelated character and he was a monster.\u00a0 He randomly hopped about the board.\u00a0 If he landed on you, *BOOM* you were dead.\u00a0 End of game, do you want to play again?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You operated the player via an 8-direction joystick plugged in to the joystick port.\u00a0 It probably also supported keyboard, but honestly I don’t recall.<\/p>\n
Certainly it was not a complicated game.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n
In the summer of my senior year in high school I sent the program in to the magazine.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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”.\u00a0 This was very exciting to me because I’d never had anything published before!\u00a0 More importantly, they were going to pay me cash money for it!\u00a0 I was going to be a published author and I was going to get paid for it.\u00a0 Life was good.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Well, that person would be so very, very wrong.<\/p>\n
I was offered and happily accepted $625 for the rights to publish my game.\u00a0 And, on top of that, I was offered residuals which would mean they’d send me MORE money for each book sold.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Or to suggest perhaps I could negotiate on anything.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Just me.\u00a0 So, I signed it because of two simple things.\u00a0 First, I’d be a PUBLISHED AUTHOR!\u00a0 Second, they would pay me to be a PUBLISHED AUTHOR!\u00a0 The rest of it was just details.\u00a0 So, I signed it.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
Over time I also received a couple hundred more dollars as a result of sales of the book.\u00a0 I want to say that I saw sales figures and it sold maybe a few thousand copies.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n
Not long after that the publishing model for COMPUTE! and the Gazette changed and started trailing off pretty dramatically.\u00a0 Brought on, in part, by the advent of the Internet.\u00a0 And the fact that folks got REALLY tired of typing in their own programs.\u00a0 So my game got published kind of in the sweet spot for that time and I’m fortunate for that.<\/p>\n
Growing up I imagined that I might write, much like the authors I read and loved like Heinlein and Asimov.\u00a0 That didn’t turn out to be my route.\u00a0 Instead I wrote software and software has been good to me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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