A woman contacted me on Facebook to tell me that she of a gift she was preparing for her grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. The boy is a very avid gamer, and she wanted to present him with a book of letters written by people who worked in the game industry. She asked me to make a contribution, and here is more of what I wrote.

While most of my college assignments involved using the computer to solve scientific and business problems, I took any opportunity I could to use the university computer to print out poetry or pictures. My COBOL professor took an interest in my creative efforts and offered me a job as a clerk in the computer store he owned with several partners.

Rainbow Computing was the second computer store to open in the Los Angeles area, about a block away from the Cal State Northridge campus. The store mainly sold mini-computers for small businesses, but soon after I started working there, we began selling a computer made for home use – the Apple II.

Programming was now emerging as a hobby. People formed computer clubs to discuss this new technology, computer magazines appeared with programming tips, and hobbyists would hang out at their local computer store on the weekend. At first, people had to write all their own software, including games, but as they did, computer stores began selling them. Rainbow Computing published its own software catalog selling programs mostly written by its customers. Part of my job was to make copies of the floppy disks containing the programs, photocopy instruction manuals, and put everything into zip lock baggies for sale either on the store floor or through the catalog.

Once people realized that there was money to be made here, some began forming actual software publishing companies. A couple of the earliest game publishers, including Ken Williams of Sierra Online, bought their first computers at Rainbow Computing. Another, Sherwin Steffin, formed a company called Edu-Ware Services, and asked me to write games for him.

The first game I wrote was what would now be called an expansion for a science fiction role-playing game called Space that Edu-Ware had published. I wrote Space II in about two weeks (I still had my college homework and store clerk duties to do, after all!). It received good reviews from the computer magazines, and I earned about $100 in royalties for my efforts. Afterwards, I wrote an oil crisis simulation called Windfall (one week programming time) and a television programming strategy game called Network (I had to do that one in three days because Edu-Ware wanted to show it at the San Francisco Computer Faire that weekend).

After I graduated from college, I joined Edu-Ware as a full-time employee. The company operated out of Sherwin’s apartment, and I was being paid $800 a month. My parents were horrified and thought that I was throwing my education away.

I didn’t care. Although Edu-Ware was primarily in the business of publishing educational software, it allowed me to also occasionally design and program games for them. Now, when I was in college, I watched a British television show called The Prisoner airing on the local PBS station. It was about a spy who, after resigning, was abducted and taken to a resort-like open-air prison called The Village. The show dealt with issues about individuality and the role of authority, but it was also very surreal and bizarre. I absolutely loved it, and I convinced Edu-Ware’s management to let me spend six weeks making a game based on it, even though the show really wasn’t that well known here in the United States.

The game turned out to be a critical hit and sold well for Edu-Ware. However, we never acquired the rights to the television series because we were naïve about such things as trademarks and copyrights, but the entertainment industry wasn’t paying attention to home computer games, so we got away with it.

A woman contacted me on Facebook to tell me that she of a gift she was preparing for her grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. The boy is a very avid gamer, and she wanted to present him with a book of letters written by people who worked in the game industry. She asked me to make a contribution, and here is what I wrote.

Dear Owen.

Your grandmother asked me to write this letter to you describing how I came to work in the game industry. You are very lucky to have a mother who is so encouraging about such an unusual career, because my parents weren’t – at least, not as first.

You see, when I was your age back in the 1970s, video games consisted of simple blips on black & white television monitors. Technology was nowhere near advanced as it is today. Computers were the size of refrigerators, telephones carried voice conversations over wires, and calculators costs $100 a pop.

Despite having grown up as a sci-fi geek who read books about advances in technology, I never imagined playing games on a device like a computer and certainly not a phone. Although I did design my own board games, my career interests were in art, writing, and film. Because my eye-hand coordination wasn’t very good, and I hated math, I never saw myself using any equipment more sophisticated than a movie camera.

One thing I did know for certain was where I would be going to college. California State University in Northridge was just a couple of miles from my house, and it never occurred to me to enroll anywhere that wasn’t a short bicycle ride away. I also knew that the campus had a well-regarded Radio-Television-Film department.

However, when I bicycled down to pre-register for RTVF, my heart sank – the preregistration line was filled with hundreds of people. I didn’t believe that all these people would be able to find jobs in the very competitive entertainment industry, and I didn’t have enough faith in myself to believe that my chances were any better than theirs. So, I decided to enroll in a variety of courses to figure out what subject to major in.

Despite not seeing myself as an engineering-type, I decided to enroll in an introductory computer science course, because, as I said, I was a science fiction fan. At first, I did not like it one bit: coding, logic, flowcharts, processors, and binary arithmetic – none of it made sense to me. Until, as suddenly as turning on a light switch, it all made sense to me, and I figured out how to make a computer do my bidding.

A few weeks later I was sitting in the computer lab waiting to use the shared printer to print out my homework. To pass the time, I started typing out a Star Trek game in which the player was in control of the Enterprise and needed to combat Klingon warships in the adjoining sectors. Although I still wasn’t particularly fond of math, I figured out how to use algebraic equations to determine the distances between ships and plot out firing trajectories. As I was planning out attack scenarios, it occurred to me that a computer could be used to tell a story, but one in which the player interacted with the plot. I could see the computer as being as valid an artistic medium as an easel, typewriter or movie camera. And so, as soon as I printed out my homework, I went down to the administration office and changed my major from “Undecided” to “Computer Science”.