cont…
Something was definitely in the air.
Dream check #3: Almost a decade later, in 1983, I wound up working as a computer consultant in an office in La Jolla, CA which received Peter Vjak’s mail after he had moved on to another job prior to my arrival. This consulting job had nothing to do with space, limits to growth, etc.
I sat down at a PLATO terminal next to Danny Sleator and told him I was going to destroy Spasim. He thought I was joking. I went into the “lesson” in edit mode, paged through each part, marking off the blocks to be deleted. Danny’s mouth was agape, and stuttered something like “Y—you’re not really going to do this Bowery.” But I was a man possessed. I hit the SHIFT-HELP key to activate the deletion. Danny sat there stunned. Then he said, “Oh, you’re going to go into the disk utility and recover everything.” I then created a huge common storage that filled up the file space with zeros. Then I deleted it. Danny yelled, “You’re CRAZY!”
Over the next 3 days, “Canzo” and I barely slept as we rewrote Spasim from the ground up using his optimizations and my new game theory design. Cases of Coke and cartons of Marlboros later, it worked like a champ! I gave up drinking Cokes immediately and stopped smoking a bit later.
The audience shrank to about ½ of what it had been because it wasn’t the simple first-person-shoot-em-up theme it once was – you had to strategize more, use warfare sparingly and figure out how to keep your planet stable.
In the new Spasim, you have to find those rare others that will not betray you as you cooperate to get to the very distant and difficult to reach resources. If you find genuine cooperators, or if you can effectively enforce cooperation, you can get out of the normal conflicts and focus on reaching your destiny. And then you win!
The End
See also: