I’m interested in interactive fiction again lately, so when I stumbled across a picture of a younger Dave Lebling on The Computer Chronicles from 1985, I had to track down the episode and watch it. My Dad and I used to watch this show every Saturday morning when I was a kid!

It’s actually a pretty interesting watch for anyone currently into computer and/or videogames, just to see how little has changed in the past 23 years. Yes, little… though the technology has improved, so many of the same preconceptions, arguments, and tensions are still around.

In the post-Atari, pre-Nintendo industry cooldown, attention turned back to computer games, as well as speculation toward what the role of games would be in the industry. Taking a definite “they’re back to being complex toys for hobbyists” stance, the late Gary Kildall certainly didn’t have the long view for the eventual social and cultural significance of games (and, one could argue, he didn’t for operating systems, either).

Anyway, check out the episode in its entirety:

It starts off with demos of Sargon and Millionaire for the (then brand spanking new) Macintosh, then moves into a very awkward demo/interview segment with Lebling and David Crane, co-founder of Activision. I mean awkward in about three senses — Crane and Lebling seem uncomfortable around each other as wings of very different kinds of games (Activision leading the way with graphical games, Lebling’s Infocom still trying to compete with text-only games), Crane seems giddily happy with all the dumb, silly eye-candy around the Ghostbusters game, and, of course, it was Activision who would later buy Infocom about one year later. I don’t know how far Infocom’s talks with Activision had proceeded by the time this was filmed — or if they’d even started — but with hindsight, we can see the eventual end of Infocom right there on that table (with a bouncing ball highlighting Ray Parker, Jr. lyrics).

So, sort of depressing, I guess. Lebling argued that their games would eventually move beyond the short form to more “novel-like” games, and that clearly didn’t happen (at least in text games). Rather, it seems that the short form has exploded and flourished in the past 15 years, with the advent of Graham Nelson’s (and collaborators’) Inform, among other interactive fiction platforms.

Also be sure to check out the amusing commentary by Paul Schindler on why Candyland is superior to videogames (because, of course, videogames cause people to “lose human interaction”), not to mention the news summary at the end about the rise of 15-lb. “lap portable” computers, computerized shoe customization, and how “the end of QWERTY” was supposedly near.

So, okay, maybe a few things have changed in 23 years.