Rewind 15, 16 years.
I’m 15 years old, going to high school in Boston. Every free moment of time I have — recess, lunch, after school, and more than a few study halls I conveniently disappeared from — has me creeping, up, up, up to the top of the school where the Science department is, walking stealthily down the quiet hallway, speeding past lit doorways… my destination, the Physics room. Bated breath, fingers crossed. Will it be empty? Or will there be a class going on, so I will have to turn around, heart heavy with disappointment? The room is dark: my soul leaps within me. I creep in, glancing nervously about. Cross the room to the back, sit down at one of the black-topped lab benches and turn on one of the computers that languish here, wincing against the beeps and squawks of startup, so loud in the empty room.
Why am I here, you ask?
I am here because I have been struck hard with an obsession… an obsession for the coolest physics game ever: The Incredible Machine, made by that greatest ever of game companies, now lost in the fogs of history, Sierra On-Line.
I don’t know why it was loaded on those computers — hardly used, as they were — for just a few short months of that one year of my high school life. I don’t remember how I discovered it, I don’t remember when it went away: I remember only the crushing disappointment when I realized that my game was no more. (I think I’d won all the levels by that point anyway.)
Life went on, and I forgot the name of the game, and I moved onto Real Life and Bigger and Better Things… yet over the passing years, flashbacks of the game would come back to me and I would think of it, a little sadly, certain I would never find it again. I used to tell Zaubi about this great physics game I used to play, and he’d nod and smile, and then it would pass from my memory again. And thus passed half my lifetime.
But then yesterday, Zaubi came home from work, and told me his work mate C. had discovered a really cool old physics DOS game, and at that moment, I knew. I didn’t say much of anything, but I could feel that funny tingle going through me — that sudden undeniable prescience. And I went straight away and looked it up, and downloaded dosbox, and spent the rest of the evening playing The Incredible Machine.
Three cheers for C., who has inadvertently breathed life into a lost era. Three cheers for everyone out there who loves old games. And three cheers for Sierra On-Line, the greatest game company in the history of the world.
ha! i think i’m the one who loaded it on there…