Me and the Computer - 2

Continuing from the previous post. (Me and the Computer - 1)


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I still remember the game that my friend and I poured our passion into, dedicating almost all our effort and time. Alone in the Dark. (sean.kr/s.php?k=Flu767) My friend and I played this game, which felt like our whole lives, after countless attempts to get it running. It was a revolutionary 3D game at the time. Looking at it now, it might seem unbelievably crude, but back then, the fact that such a thing was possible on a computer was amazing. A three-dimensional character! Wow!

Neither my friend nor I knew what the concept of dimension was. Yet, being able to move a 3D character with a PC input device was incredible. To reiterate, it was 1993, so what did people think about dimensions back then? Nowadays, you can easily access a flood of information, so common knowledge about various dimensions is generally recognized, but back then - at least in Korea - the important goal was to live an ordinary life in a job where you could work for life without major ups and downs. In such a society, having new and unusual ideas either brought very, very good results or was useless. But, 3D! Wow... My friend and I were so engrossed in the game, staring at the monitor like crazy, as if we were going to fall into it.


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And SimCity. Ah... SimCity 2000... (sean.kr/s.php?k=vcVpP5) How could such a game exist in the world? That was my impression at the time. Being able to create and manage a city...

It was in 1993 that my friend and I played the two games I mentioned above. It wasn't in Korean, and just running the game itself was complicated. There was no one to teach us, and if my friend hadn't been the son of a wealthy family, I might not have experienced a computer capable of running that game.

When I tell these stories, it sounds like my friend and I studied computers on our own without anyone teaching us, but that's not the case. There's one anecdote. It was not long after the computer was installed at my friend's house. One day, after turning on the computer and eating the fruit and drinks that my friend's mother had prepared, I went back and saw a strange pattern on the computer screen where dots were scattering outward from the center. Now I know what it was expressing, but back then, my friend and I didn't even know what it was expressing. No matter how many keys we pressed on the keyboard, the screen didn't change. After agonizing over what was going on for over 30 minutes, I pressed the ESC key and an MS-DOS window appeared. What was this? Yes, it was a screensaver. That was our level. (And the scene displayed by the screensaver was expressing traveling through space at the speed of light.)

Back then, doing something with a computer was in itself turning imagination into reality. My friend and I tried many things besides games. The very fact that strange results were expressed on the computer by writing various codes was an amazing experience. Finished things, well-made things, those were not a problem for us at all. Every time we turned on the computer and did something, it was a new experience, and that in itself was great.

To be continued in the next post.

#NostalgicGames #90sGames #ClassicGames #ComputerStory #SimCity2000 #3DGames #MSDOS #Screensaver #ChildhoodMemories #MeAndTheComputer #AloneInTheDark #SimCity2000