Last Retrospective:
"Back in Houston, Texas in 1977, a 17-year-old nerd is putting the finishing touches on the 28th version of his pet project. It's a computer game combining his love of Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien into a fantasy adventure of knightly questing against foul dungeon-dwelling monsters. Thanks to his summer job at a local Computerland store, he now has access to a sparkling-new high-tech machine called an Apple II, a magical device with outstanding graphics capability that put the previous machines he'd been working on to shame. By the time he's done his game, D&D28b, for the first time has real graphics, a view of the world's dangerous monster-filled dungeons through the player's eyes. D&D28b is a hit with his friends, and impresses the manager of the store so much that he convinces him to offer it for sale. It only sells a few copies, but one of those manages to get to a major software distributor out on the west coast called California Pacific, who, impressed, fly the teenager out to sign a contract for publishing rights. The program, now called Akalabeth (named after a chapter of Tolkien's Silmarillion) is a hit, selling 30,000+ copies, but he's not one to sit and rest on his good fortune. That autumn, the teenager starts classes at the University of Texas, and with his roommate begins writing another game to top his previous success "
Latest by Noah Antwiler.
