As the days ticked by, my mother became increasingly concerned that my father wasn’t coming back. My dad may have stayed away from us, but Grandma Suki knew all. Her wayward son was still in Tucson, but he had moved in with a woman he’d been messing around with for months. They lived in a trailer home. It was not a big secret—Grandma Suki talked to my dad, and she relayed information to my mom. My father regularly cheated on my mother. Moving out, on the other hand, was new and left my mother in a precarious position. She was twenty-six, had two kids, and no job training or work experience. Her extended family support network—the thing most people rely on—was limited to her homemaker, fifty-something mother-in-law. She refused to approach her parents for support, and it’s not entirely clear that they would have given it anyway. Both were fans of the “you did this to yourself” line of reasoning.
Learning this information about her cheating husband directly from my grandma helped clarify the situation for my mother. So did the fact he wasn’t sending her any cash. That meant confronting two immediate problems: First, she didn’t have money to buy food, and second, she didn’t have money to pay the mortgage. That meant the house on South Oregon Drive was either going to be sold or repossessed by the bank.
By necessity, my mother reinvented herself. We got food from Grandma Suki, but we didn’t live there. Instead, we bounced around, staying at the homes of my mother’s friends, whomever would take us in. A couch this week and a spare bedroom the next—we moved when we had to. My mom became self-sustaining with astounding speed. I know necessity is the mother of invention, but I also feel invention had been gestating in my mom. On some level, she was ready to change her life after eight years of struggling to survive with a man who wasn’t, on multiple levels, equipped to provide domestic stability. She took a test to become a bank teller and aced it.
Once she landed a job, we moved into an apartment near my maternal grandparents, and I switched schools. The morning of our move, I was pulled out of class by the teacher. “Your mom’s waiting for you in the office,” she said. My mom grabbed my hand, nodded to the school’s secretary, and that was that. I never saw my friends, or that school, again. I missed them and the schoolyard, but I was accustomed to unexpected changes, and I didn’t ask questions. More than anything, I welcomed the end of our homelessness.
My mother became friendly with an account holder at the bank, a military man named John Schuneman. They engaged in some casual window flirtation, but the only things my mom knew about him were the things she saw. He was tall and lean, seemed like a polite gentleman, and his savings account contained about $40,000, which was $40,000 more than her ex-husband ever had. This isn’t to say that my mother was a gold-digger; far from it. My mother knew what she didn’t want, and that was anyone with an account at or near $10 and frequently dipping below zero. Instead, she was looking for someone she liked who, ideally, was financially stable and could provide for her and her kids.
They started dating. John Schuneman was a buttoned-up guy. In some ways, he was the opposite of my dad: fiscally responsible, frugal to an almost obsessive level, dedicated to his career, sober, conservative, and willing to be a good provider. He and my dad had things in common, too. Both were drawn to machinery—John specialized in audio and video recording electronics while my dad loved car engines—both were bright in their ways, and both were domineering.
There was another similarity I didn’t find out about until a little later: Both men sometimes resorted to violence or threats as a parenting tool.
That first year was a honeymoon period for everyone, while John courted my mom. He took us to the circus and treated us to meals in restaurants, which was a rarity with my dad. He was a serious alley cat who bowled professionally at one point and would frequently take my mother bowling. It was a match made in heaven, and their relationship progressed quickly. My mother got a high-speed divorce, gaining full custody of Ralph and me.
A few months later, John got a job transfer, effective immediately, from Davis-Monthan in Tucson to Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, California. He was a consultant for the Air Force and an expert in electronic data transfer from classified Air Force surveillance systems. They were apart just over a month when he asked my mother to fly up to Reno to meet him. It was her first time on a plane. Once there, he asked her to marry him with a ten-dollar ring. Of course, she said yes. They got married on July 4, 1976, two hundred years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was both a surefire way to never forget your anniversary and a symbolic date to end a long, troubling saga with my father. My mother returned to Tucson, put in her two weeks’ notice, and packed what little we had to move to California to join John.
Over the years, the phone would ring with an assignment, and John would react instantly, like he had when he moved from Tucson to Marysville. Thirty minutes after hanging up, he was off. That’s how I remember leaving Tucson. One day I was told we were moving, and the next week we flew northwest from Tucson to Sacramento, California.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but leaving Tucson also meant leaving behind much of my culture. Prior to the move, I was surrounded by Mexican and Yaqui people, eating and sharing in the preparation of our incomparable food, singing our traditional songs, participating in our traditions, and loving and fearing our myths (particularly La Llorona). Not a day passed where I didn’t hear a grito, a Mexican outburst of joy that heralds the beginning of many a mariachi song, or people speaking Spanish (even though my father refused to teach me Spanish and forbade me from speaking it). On the weekends, I played in the desert and visited San Xavier del Bac, the mission on the reservation. My stepfather hated my father, and I suspect that anything Mexican or Yaqui was nothing more to him than a reflection of the man that had caused his new wife so much pain. He was glad to leave it behind, but for me, its absence left a hole. For Ralph, who had less time in Tucson than I did, the initial impact was smaller, but I could tell he still felt it. These days, whenever I read articles about how important those early years are, I smile, because in spite of the move, in spite of the separation from my culture, I have never felt anything less than what I am—proudly of Mexican and Indigenous heritage. I am grateful to my relatives, particularly my father and my Uncle Ralph, Aunts Yoly and Gracie, and my cousins Trisha and Olga for keeping it alive and sharing so much of it with me.
We arrived in Roseville, California, sort of the midway point between Sacramento and Beale Air Force Base. We lived in the Flamingo Motel for about three months while my parents looked for a house. It was there that I was introduced to the next big influence in my life—horror films, and specifically the horror films of William Castle. I will never forget watching my first William Castle movie.
Castle is not exactly a household name, but among fans of horror movies, he is widely revered. Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis has called him his favorite filmmaker. So has cult-camp auteur John Waters of Hairspray fame. The movie I saw, Mr. Sardonicus, was a black-and-white film about a cruel, wealthy man who summons a doctor to cure him of a freakish paralytic condition—a hideous, tooth-filled smile that has locked itself on his face. The makeup for Mr. Sardonicus looked like it had been melded from high-tech silly putty and was super creepy. I loved it. Another thing that impressed me came toward the end of the film when the William Castle himself appeared and gave viewers a choice—or the illusion that they had a choice—to influence the ending via a “Punishment Poll.” Each audience member was provided a voting card. When it came time for the voting, Castle broke the fourth wall and spoke directly to the audience, asking them for their choice, before announcing the winner of the vote: punishment. It was predetermined, but that illusion of agency made it seem real for many. For Castle, it was a fun, entertaining marketing scheme. However, that scheme made something resonate for me. I spend my life designing games where players (viewers) made choices that determined how their story ends.
My mom and stepdad finally found a house in Rocklin, just north of Sacramento. It was a great awakening for a low-income kid from the desert. Our backyard bordered a lush golf course. There were no scorpions, tarantulas, or rattlesnakes underfoot to worry about, so I could go outside without risking sudden death. Instead of parched earth and cacti, there was a creek that ran behind our house, before you reached the golf course, and I’d play there, surrounded by cattails and leafy trees, looking for tadpoles and frogs. Other kids would come over, and we’d play hide-and-seek. After six o’clock, when the golfing was over, we’d play on the green. It was a little bit of heaven. This isn’t to say I didn’t love Tucson, too. I did! But this new landscape meant new adventures. Because I was nearly nine, I also had more freedom to explore.
The house in Rocklin was a bastion of stability in many ways. There was always food in the kitchen, my mother didn’t want for anything, and John provided us with dental insurance. My mom could finally afford to get the rest of my messed-up teeth fixed. It wasn’t exactly fun for me. Rare is the kid who relishes getting full-on braces and headgear to sleep in. I knew it was for the best, though, and that it would pay off—I didn’t want a mouth like Mr. Sardonicus.
The only threat to my well-being, ironically, was the guy who made this semi-idyllic new life happen: my stepdad, John Schuneman. He regularly threatened physical violence. He told me he knew karate, told me he’d kick me into tomorrow and other general threats whenever I wasn’t behaving as he expected me to. This was his major tool, and it worked, particularly since I’d come from a home where violence was the norm. I did my chores as soon as I was asked or needed to because I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I didn’t.
As I got older, and increasingly independent, we clashed. John had been a drill sergeant in the Air Force, and in many ways, he was a drill sergeant out of the Air Force, too. It was his way or the highway. His rules and manner often struck me as arbitrary and unreasonable. I was an easygoing, neat, good-natured tween who did whatever was asked of me. Even my mother would say that I “was always a good boy.” Of course, like every kid my age, I also embraced being a kid. I was into playing, joking around, expressing myself, and experiencing new things. My even-keeled demeanor was a good thing, because my survival depended on literally rolling with the punches—mental, verbal, and eventually, physical ones. It’s easy to see with twenty-twenty hindsight that my being a pleasure-seeking kid named Romero did not bode well in the Schuneman household. John loathed my dad, scornfully referring to him as “the Latin lover.” No doubt he detected my dad’s genetic traces in my quest for fun, entertainment, and thrills. It probably didn’t help that I looked just like him.
One day in 1977, my dad’s quest for fun caught up with him. My mother called Ralph and me into her bedroom.
“Your father is in the hospital in Tucson,” she told us. “He’s going to survive, but he’s going to be there a long while.”
“What happened?”
“He had an accident.”
He left work on his motorcycle, passed a car while going eighty miles per hour, ran directly into an oncoming vehicle also doing eighty, and wound up under it. The impact should have killed him, and it almost did. He flatlined four times on the operating table. My mother communicated with my aunt Gracie daily until she knew what to tell us—if he would live, or if he would die—but she didn’t want us suffering, sitting on pins and needles worried. My father was a tough guy. He spent a year in traction, and came out of hospital with one leg noticeably shorter than the other. I was grateful he survived.
Unlike my father, my stepdad was about practicality, consistency, and financial security, but he was also big on fostering independence. (As my cynical teen self would later observe, he promoted independent behavior as long as it didn’t conflict with his wishes and opinions.) The former drill sergeant who had transformed recruits into battle-ready soldiers came by his unrelenting, hard-ass work ethic honestly, and he deployed his mania for work on me. When I was about eleven, I wanted a stereo in my room. At the time I don’t think I’d ever wanted anything so much in my life. We cut a deal: In return for getting a Symphonic-brand stereo for Christmas, a three-speed turntable with a cassette deck and a radio tuner, I would get a job and pay my parents back.
That’s right: I bought my own Christmas present.
Somehow this was bestowed to me as a gift, and I suppose it was, since I didn’t have any collateral. Still, it’s hard not to laugh as I look back now and think my stepdad was engaged in parental loan sharking. In the end, my gift cost him nothing. I suppose maybe there was the greater gift of learning to be self-reliant, and I sure did love having that stereo.
I mowed lawns to earn the money, charging five bucks a lawn. Finding a steady stream of clients was easier said than done for an eleven-year-old kid in the California suburbs, where everybody had a lawnmower. I decided to try my hand at delivering newspapers.
My alarm clock would go off at 3:00 every morning, and I’d drag myself out to the porch in front of the house where two bundles—about one hundred copies—of the Sacramento Bee awaited my attention. I undid the bundles and started folding the papers that had just come off the press, which meant the ink was not entirely dry. I couldn’t bring the papers inside because the ink would get all over the carpet. I did all my folding outside, even on freezing mornings. If it was raining, or threatening to rain, I’d huddle under the overhang on our porch, folding the papers and shoving them in plastic bags. Then I’d place the folded papers in my delivery bag, stuffing as many papers as I possibly could inside. It became a game of optimization—each time I had to come home to refill my bag translated into tripling the distance I had to bike. If I was a mile away, I’d have to bike a mile home, then bike a mile back to the house where I’d run out of papers.
All of this folding, bagging, and stowing took about ninety minutes. So, it was around 4:30 a.m. when I’d get on my bicycle and begin my rounds through the often-freezing, foggy, dark predawn. I had to be alert. My clients went on vacation, they suspended delivery, they canceled their subscriptions, and I had to keep track of all this in my head. When I ran out of papers, I had to be sure to remember where to restart my route. The details of the paper route gave me one of my earliest insights into how my brain stored and retrieved details. I did not find it hard to remember all these pieces of data, and I enjoyed the logistical challenges that it presented as well as the responsibility of a job.
I tried to be done by 6:30 at the latest. On weekdays I had to get home, take a shower, eat breakfast, and be at the bus stop at 7:15 to get to school. Of course, Sundays were a different story. The papers were usually five times the size of the daily papers, and I could fit only about eight copies into my delivery bag. I rode back to my house constantly to reload. I finished my route a few hours after the sun had come up.
At the end of every month, I spent my afternoons collecting money from subscribers. A month’s subscription for the Bee cost about $5. That meant once a month, I gathered anywhere from $250 to $500, and I kept half of that. Working about three hours a day, seven days a week adds up to around ninety-three hours a month. For that, I cleared $250—at best. I’m not kidding when I say this was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done in my entire life, and I’m a guy who has done his fair share of grinding, hundred-hour workweeks. It wasn’t all work for me, though. I also had great friends I enjoyed hanging out with.
Christian Divine was oe of my first and best friends in our new neighborhood. He was a great artist, and we both drew comics. Sometimes we drew cartoons with blank dialogue bubbles and let the other person fill in the words. Sometimes we collaborated on stories where I wrote a paragraph, and then he wrote the next paragraph. They were funny scenarios, where we wrote from opposite points of view, with Christian trying to kill the character while I’m trying to keep him alive. Christian introduced me to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game system that was beginning to work its way from the niche wargaming miniature groups to board-game players and fans of the fantasy genre. The magic of creating a character and taking them on adventures felt like an extension of our comics and stories. Instead of just reading the work of other people, we were creating whole adventures and participating in them. The AD&D system was rudimentary in 1978, particularly compared to what it is now, but even then, it provided an excellent scaffolding for our active imaginations.
In our early teens, Christian got ahold of a video camera, and we made short films, enacting comic skits. We made films whenever we crossed paths for the next fifteen years, including a live-action short when we were twenty-seven. If you’ve played the BAFTA award–winning game Life Is Strange, for which Christian was the lead writer, you will find many references to our young lives and early films.
Between AD&D, school and my paper route, I was busy. I went to bed at 9 p.m. every night to get six hours of sleep before the alarm clock shocked me awake, and I kept up the entire routine for more than two years. Why?
Well, I had to clear my stereo debt, but then there was another payoff—a more enjoyable one: $250 equals one thousand quarters.
That was the other thing I spent my time doing. Playing arcade games.
In October 1978, Taito’s Space Invaders was released in the United States. Thirteen months later, Atari’s Asteroids came out. They were cool games—fun, kill-or-be-killed thrillers. Space Invaders was the first game to save high scores and let players put their initials next to them. This was a smart marketing move. What kid didn’t want bragging rights when they had skills at a kickass game? This was the first baby step in competitive video gaming. I loved both games, but Asteroids let players move more freely than Space Invaders. Your ship could move both vertically and horizontally, which wasn’t the case for the move-left-or-right options of the Space Invader canon. Having that control of movement was a liberating sensation.
As much as I loved pinball, these video games were a step up for me. Pinball, as great and nuanced as it is, always felt a little uncontrollable or random. The tools at your disposal weren’t highly nuanced. The spring of the plunger varied from game to game. The flippers were your only constant tool, but there were so many elements of the game you couldn’t control. Some bumpers were fast, others were softer and slower. The angles and speed always felt variable. With Asteroids and Space Invaders, the computer-generated experience was consistent machine to machine and game to game; the playing field was level, generally speaking, no matter where you played it. Pinball and arcade games also differed in another key area: Pinball, regardless of the artwork or the name of a game, was locked into the same basic formula. Video games could be anything they wanted to be and could defy the rules of time, space, and gravity.
I spent a lot of time and money playing Asteroids when I was eleven, and my stepdad was not happy about it—neither was my mother. Eventually, he banned me from playing after school. I was supposed to come home and stay home. This made no sense to me. I was doing well in school and in my paper route. Why couldn’t I spend an hour playing games while using my own money to do it? One time, I chose to disobey my stepdad and went to Round Table Pizza down the street. Most kids parked their bikes in front of the pizzeria, but I knew who I was up against, so I hid my bike in the back of the building, figuring if either my mom or stepdad drove by, they would never spot my bike.
I was having a great time hanging out with my friends, and I was locked into a game of Asteroids, racking up points and earning extra lives. Then, out of nowhere, my face was smashed into the screen of the game.
“What the hell?” I cried.
It was my stepdad. He had driven by and decided to conduct a spot check.
“Let’s go, John. You are coming home. Now!”
Both sides of my head were throbbing. My stepdad grabbed the back of my head and pushed as hard as he could. It’s a miracle the glass didn’t crack. My face had borne most of the impact. I was hurt, furious, and humiliated. I didn’t say a word. My hands rose to my face to brace for a bloody nose. He grabbed me by my shirt with both hands and pulled me away from the game and threw me ahead of him. I stumbled and then walked out to his pickup truck and got in. He swung the truck around to the back, grabbed my bike, and threw it in the bed. It hit with an impact I knew was sure to damage it.
Two minutes later we were home.
Grandma Ann, who was visiting at the time, was sitting in the dining room.
“I told you not to go to the arcade!” he ranted. “I expressly said it was off-limits. No more video games. You went anyway. You didn’t give a shit. Now take off your glasses.”
I knew what he meant. My stepdad was a big man, six feet two and muscular. As a kid, I didn’t have his muscles, and I definitely didn’t have his height. (I’m five feet nine inches.)
“I don’t want to take off my glasses,” I said to him.
“Take them off now, or I’ll take them off.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew if I said “no” again that I’d provoke him.
“I’m warning you.”
He was directly in front of me. Bigger. Stronger. Menacing. I pulled my glasses off.
My stepfather punched me in the face. I went sprawling, knocked on my ass.
I stood up as quickly as I could. My lip was bleeding, and my jaw was sore. I refused to cry. I looked over at my grandmother, who was sitting calmly in a dining room chair. She had seen the entire exchange.
“You got what you deserved,” she said.
Sure, I misbehaved, but I don’t think a kid ever deserves a punch, especially from a man in his forties. I bolted from the house—the house that I was supposed to come home to straight after school—and went over to my friend Tommy’s (not his real name). I couldn’t believe what had just happened, or my grandmother’s reaction. Then I remembered my mother telling me that her father had beaten her brothers. This was history repeating itself for my grandmother. I never told my mom, but I assumed she heard from my grandmother.
Tommy greeted me at his front door. “What the hell happened to you?”
“My stepdad found me at Round Table. He just punched me in the face.”
“Oh man.”
We were an unofficial support group. His parents had beaten him far worse—his father once lifted him off the floor by his hair, and his stepmom once woke him up by smashing a frying pan in his face. Later, he’d spend many years of his adult life in mental institutions. We were grateful to have someone who understood, but he wasn’t an entirely reliable friend, either. A year later, he came over to my house after I had collected my paper route money for the month—about $500. When he left, I noticed the money was gone. When I told my mom, she accused me of having blown it on arcade games.
I couldn’t believe she thought that. I owed that money to the paper route supervisors. It would have been like stealing from myself.
“Mom, I owe this money to the delivery company. If I don’t pay them, I don’t have a job anymore. Why would I do that?”
She still didn’t believe me, and neither did my stepfather. I wasn’t surprised that John thought I’d stolen money, but I couldn’t believe my mother doubted me. It was a horrible moment; I felt like my stepfather was poisoning my mother against me. It was bad enough that I knew a friend had ripped me off. Not having my mother trust me somehow felt worse. Adding insult to injury, I worked for free that month and had to take money out of my savings account to pay off the route. A lot had changed for me during this time, and looking back, I suppose I felt alone.
This dynamic of distrust and scorn was a big part of my early teens. One of my most painful memories is overhearing a discussion between my parents when they talked about me.
“He’s a Romero,” my mom sighed. “He’s going to be a loser just like his dad.”
It felt like a punch to the chest. My heart sank. I know she said this in a moment of anger because she was mad at me. Deep down, I don’t think she really believed it.
I often wonder about the events that shape our lives. If my dad hadn’t walked out on us, my mom would have never met John Schuneman, and we would never have moved to California, and if that hadn’t happened, what was arguably the most important event in my life might never have occurred.
It was a Saturday in the summer before my twelfth birthday. My brother and my other great friend, Rob Lavelock, pulled up on their bikes and came to find me. They were breathless with excitement.
“John, you’ve got to see this!” Ralph said.
“See what?”
“A place where there are video games, and it doesn’t cost any money. You can play for free.”
I looked at Rob. We were the same age, although he was a grade behind me at school.
“It’s true.” He nodded.
“No way!”
“For free,” Ralph said again.
Sign. Me. Up.
I immediately hopped on my bike and made the ride with Ralph and Rob to Sierra College. They led me to a big room with CRT computer monitors. I was a little in shock at first. When someone said “video games,” I automatically thought “arcade,” and I imagined playing game after game of Galaxian and Lunar Lander for free. As it turned out, that was a little too good to be true. This was the school’s computer lab, although it didn’t look like a laboratory to me—there were no test tubes or anything like that. Rob explained that his neighbor, Lenny Lipson, had told him about the lab, that it was a place where you could program computers. Lenny gave Rob his password to log into the system.
Rob was a unique kid. He was super-smart, and his family nurtured his interest in video games and computers, unlike mine. They were generous, well-to-do people. His dad was the chief of the Rocklin Fire Department, and his mother was a homemaker. She was happy to drive us to arcades and give Rob money to play games. At the time, Monaco GP and Head On were new, and he played them a lot, trying to get further with each quarter. She must have spent hundreds of dollars on Rob’s arcade game interest. His parents also bought a steady stream of home computers. Since we were great friends, I slept over at Rob’s countless times and played hours and hours of games on his various systems over the years—the Magnavox Odyssey 2 and the Atari 800 computer.
So, while it might seem unlikely that an eleven-year-old had wrangled a computer account password at a local college, it was totally in keeping with Rob’s personality and connections. Like me, when it came to gaming, his enthusiasm and curiosity were infectious. Fortunately, the college students were happy to share their knowledge about computers and games.
We walked around the lab the way we walked around a new arcade—gazing over people’s shoulders at the screens. We watched students typing on keyboards that were connected to a giant computer in the next room. It was all fascinating to me. Eventually, we asked a student what he was doing. We learned the terminals were attached to something called a “mainframe” running “Unix.” He told us he was playing a game, but it looked unlike any game I’d seen. He typed his command, and the game posted a response. One of the games, Hunt the Wumpus, involved going into caves to look for a monster. A question appeared on the screen, and the player chose the direction of their search. It wasn’t a graphical game. Everything was left to the player’s imagination.
We sat at a terminal and logged in with Lenny’s password, and we figured out how to access Hunt the Wumpus. It was challenging in its way—a logic game that forced you to explore a series of caves. It wasn’t that scary, I guess, but it was still cool.
Not everyone was playing games in the lab. One student explained to us that he was writing code for a programming assignment.
“What’s programming?”
“That’s how you tell the computer what to do. Like, how you make these games. You have to speak its language. It’s called programming.”
“You mean, you can make your own games?”
“Sure. These games are written in a language called BASIC. You have to give each line a number and format commands correctly and in order so that the program understands what you want it to do—what should show up on the screen and what it should do with the user input.”
That was all I needed to hear. Not only could I play games, I could make my own. Right in this room.
Now all I needed to do was learn BASIC.
I started writing down commands I saw on people’s screens.
PRINT.
INPUT.
GOTO.
Then, I went over to my terminal and wrote the same thing. I was nervous, though. I was scared someone would complain about annoying kids in the lab. Instead, someone took pity on me and gave me a book that had been left in the lab, an HP BASIC book. It was a godsend. I looked up what I needed to know and experimented with new commands.
That day kicked off my self-imposed, two-year crash course in programming as a non-enrolled student at Sierra College. Rob and I were devoted novices, preteen apprentices to the UNIX computing system. Every Saturday, we biked to the campus and spent hours watching students, reading whatever guides and manuals we found. When we discovered that one computer gamer showed up at 7 a.m. on Saturdays to play Colossal Cave Adventure, supposedly the coolest game ever, we got there at the same time to sit and watch the “action.” Gaming today is light years ahead of Colossal Cave Adventure, but to give you an example, here’s how this funny, irreverent game introduced itself:
SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS A COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID TO WORK IN THE CAVE. I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH COMMANDS OF 1 OR 2 WORDS.
After that explanation, the game began:
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
From that point on, you made choices to find the cave and find the treasure, writing “north” or “west” or “left” or “right.”
I loved this game and its agency. I made choices, and it reacted and took me places. The game was funny—when you died, the program might say it was out of colored smoke, so you couldn’t be reincarnated. I had no idea that Colossal Cave Adventure was regarded as the first work of interactive fiction, or that it spearheaded a major genre. I just liked it and savored the new knowledge that it had been created by somebody who was interested in computers, like we were. Before Sierra College, I’d never given much thought to making arcade games. Now the world seemed full of possibilities.
I found my calling then and there. It was all I cared about, all I wanted to learn, and all I wanted to do. I thought about code when I woke up and fell asleep committing commands to memory (GOSUB and RETURN, FOR and NEXT, IF and ELSE, END).
Ralph never expressed much interest in learning to code, but Rob was an instrumental ally. We had knowledge races, competing to see who could learn more about programming faster. When I built my first game in BASIC—a simple game in which you explored a few rooms—I showed it to Rob. He was the only one. I didn’t want to bother anybody in the lab or call attention to myself or Rob. That’s why getting that HP BASIC book was a huge relief. I needed to keep access to the lab, and going around asking students to look at my games or to teach me could hinder that access.
I think it is likely that my thirst to absorb everything about BASIC propelled the onset of my hyperthymesia, or made me and others aware of it. I was obsessed with retaining everything I learned, and so I compulsively repeated the things in my mind. There was no internet to look things up. There were precious few books, and I didn’t have the money to buy them anyway. So, necessity was the mother of retention. I took notes, I read whatever handouts and books people had in the lab, and I tried diligently to remember everything I encountered. Absolutely everything.