1970s

Adventuring within the Digital Age

Nature

Growing up on an acreage which overlooked a river valley near Namao, Alberta was a pretty amazing experience as a kid in the early 1970s, as all of nature was my backyard. Often I would wander off with our dog for an hour or two, walking along the train tracks near our house or exploring the fields, forests, or river nearby.

When we moved to St. Alberta, Alberta in the mid 1970s, I was fortunate in that the town itself had a lot of nature within it as well. Our home was across the street from the Sturgeon River and only a couple of blocks away from Father Lacombe school, with the might Seven Hills rising behind it. Often I would spend my time down by the river or up in a tree on the Seven Hills, even creating a tiny “treehouse” from a few planks of wood, from which I could look down upon the town. Skateboarding or biking crazily down the extremely steep streets next to the Seven Hills was another activity that my friends and I enjoyed as well.

Music

Growing up with two older brothers who bought tons of music albums, it wasn’t much of surprise that I began to love music at this time as well. For myself, it felt like music could open up greater ways of expressing oneself and one’s feelings than I had ever experienced before.

Drawing

One of my friends in St. Albert, Alberta at the time was a boy named Lewis Lavoie (now a famous artist and illustrator) who was such an amazing drawer that he inspired me to try out drawing for myself. Even though my animal drawings were no where near as amazing as his, I still enjoyed drawing and showing my parents my creations.

Hamurabi

I remember my oldest brother bringing over a portal mainframe terminal that had a socket for a phone to be cradled within it, thus letting you connect to a mainframe computer elsewhere. Connecting it up, he let me play my first text-based game called Hamurabi. While the game itself wasn’t that engaging at the time, the idea that you could play games on computers was a marvel to me.

Colossal Cave Adventure

My first text-based computer game sitting at a mainframe terminal was Colossal Cave Adventure. My oldest brother brought me into the University of Alberta’s computer department and let me play the game on one of the mainframe’s terminals. This game blew my mind at the time because due to the vivid text descriptions within the game, I actually thought other people were playing the game at the same time. Of course, online multiplayer video games wouldn’t appear for another decade though. 

Hobbit & Lord of the Rings

My first epic fantasy novels. My brother had these novels and I simply devoured them when I discovered them. There was something about this fantasy world that captured my imagination in a such deep way that other books before it hadn’t.

Dungeons & Dragons

My first role playing game. While I had played a lot of board games growing up, my mind was blown away when I discovered this game because I realized I could effectively role play the Lord of the Rings novel, putting myself and my friends in the middle of the action and adventure. I designed my first adventure as a Dungeon Master world builder, whereby my friends had to adventure within an old keep invested with goblins and ruled by a dragon hidden deep beneath it within a subterranean cavern.

Star Wars

After our family moved back to our acreage near Namao, Alberta, the release of the movie Star Wars was a pretty momentous occasion for me at the time, as I had never seen anything so visually overwhelming and imaginative on the screen before. Loving the movie so much, I remember buying The Story of Star Wars album afterwards and listening to the movie over and over again, while looking at the movie scenes within the picture booklet that accompanied it. In fact, I even remember starting to draw the characters from the movie, like R2D2, using these visuals and even getting some of my drawings as cartoons added to our school’s paper at the time.

TRS-80 Micro Computer System

My first desktop personal computer was a TRS-80. I remember for my birthday my Dad telling me I could have either a motocross bike or a personal computer. While my friends had motocross bikes, personal computers were the bleeding edge of technology, so I couldn’t resist getting one, thus altering the trajectory of my life. While I enjoyed spending my time playing games upon it, I also learned how to code my own simple programs on it as well in the BASIC programming language. I even remember one Halloween programming an image of a pumpkin, pixel by pixel, on the computer’s screen and displaying it in our home’s window.

Traveller

My first sci-fi roleplaying game was Traveller. Noticing this in my favourite gaming shop, I decided to try this sci-fi themed game out as well. While my friends and I found the mechanics engaging and enjoyable (kind of like an Eve Online RPG), the content for D&D was overwhelmingly more amazing in comparison, so we stuck with that as our first and main RPG we loved.