Gaming History

My wife played a few of Sierra's Quest series games back in the day, as did I. Actually, we both still remember the heyday of the text adventure. (We didn't need no stinkin' graphics back then.) That's why I was surprised to learn that despite our shared love for adventure games, she'd never played any adventures by Lucasarts.

I know, I know, it's shocking.

So I determined that she needed to experience all these fantastic games, if only so she could understand some of the odd things I said at the oddest moments. Digging through my archives, I maanaged to find copies of Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island, both of which still run under Windows XP. We're midway through Escape now. But what of all the older Lucasarts gems? For that, I had to turn to ScummVM. I found out about it at Ron Gilbert's blog Grumpy Gamer. (Ron Gilbert was the mastermind behind the original SCUMM engine, which, in various incarnations, drove classics like Maniac Mansion, the Moneky Island series, several Indiana Jones games, and others.) Suddenly, this vast treasure trove of gaming goodness opened up for us.

This made me realize, that in addition to helping me relive my childhood, the ScummVM team, and the emulator crowd in general, are doing us a great favor when they port older games to new platforms. This is gaming history. These earlier games, crude though they may seem at times, helped to define the genres we know today. Ten, twenty, or one hundred years from now, people will think, "How did all this get started?" We've lost in the mists of antiquity the firsts of other great media revolutions. It's good to know that our computer, arcade, and console gaming history will not be lost as well.