Fed II Star - May 21, 2006

A MONKEY'S TALE

Let's try a little thought experiment: You want to play an online game but your computer has been snatched away by aliens. On second thoughts, that's a cliche if ever there was one. Scratch that. Your computer has been snatched away by pirates. Hmm, still a dreaded cliche. Avoiding a cliche is not at all easy, you know. Your computer has been snatched away by a snotty little chav wearing a Burberry baseball hat. Now that's much more realistic.

In place of your computer, you find a brown box with an integral keyboard and a very chunky modem. On closer inspection, you find that the brown box contains a 1MHz processor with 64k of RAM. This is only a few thousand times less powerful than your stolen computer. Not to worry, I'm sure that the modem is pretty special; after all, it's quite large. It has the following text written along its side: Speed: 1200/75 baud. "That must be in kilobits per second", I hear you say. I'm afraid not. The first part refers to the download speed and denotes 1200 bits per second, the second part refers to the upload speed and denotes a whopping 75 bits per second. At full speed it would take about one and a half minutes to download an average image and over twenty minutes to upload it anywhere. "Well what good is that for online gaming?", you cry.

Please stop interrupting, I'm getting to that. You know, it's remarkably difficult to maintain one's focus when perpetually interrupted by the "voice of the reader"; I mean I know it was me that gave you a voice in the first place but that doesn't mean you have to keep exercising it. I think this is what literary types would refer to as a schizoid narrative. I'll have to remember to mention it to my therapist; and perhaps my mother. Actually, if I mention it to my mother first then I may be able to shoehorn a Freudian nightmare into the therapy session as well. I think it's important to make mental health professionals earn their money.

The point I'm trying to make is that the modem is slow; painfully so. As is the computer that it is attached to. And yet it was exactly this setup that I used to get my first taste of online gaming. In case you haven't figured it out, the "brown box" that I referred to above was the famous Commodore 64; It was 1987 and I had just turned thirteen. I can clearly remember getting the modem for my birthday and plugging it in for the first time before school that very morning. I loaded the software onto my C64, plugged the phone cable into the back of the modem and fired it up. It dialled a London number, there was a long pause and then it happened. The trickle of ASCII graphics onto my screen was possibly one of the most exciting things I had seen; Welcome to Compunet. This was it. The future was now!

That day, at school, all I could think of was the new world that awaited me at home; the portal of novelty sitting in my bedroom. The squitty children in that story by C.S. Lewis may have had lions, witches and Narnia in their bedroom but I had something vastly superior. You see, I knew that somewhere through this portal was a gateway to the most exciting concept I had heard of. There had been whispers among the gaming fraternity (and by that I mean the four other members of my after-school computer club) for months that someone had created a whole new universe that was accessible via Compunet. This was the reason that I had begged my parents for the modem.

As an aside, gaining access to this universe was not for the faint-hearted. The cost, had I divulged it to my parents, would have led to an immediate and firm, "NO". It cost £1.50 for every hour of connection, which in 1987 was not just an arm and a leg but probably a kidney thrown in for good measure. On top of this was a quarterly charge of £15 not to mention the call charges, which given the fact that British Telecom ruled the roost uncontested were significantly less than competitive. Still, with great things comes a great cost.

So, I eagerly logged into Compunet and connected to this brave, new world. It was called Multi User Dungeon (M.U.D. for short). Ha! I bet you thought I was going to say it was Fed, didn't you. That'll teach you to keep interrupting me. The first time I logged in, there were fourteen other players. This was really, seriously multi-user. I found the whole experience mind-blowing. I couldn't quite grasp that there were real, live people at other ends of the country who were typing words on their keyboard that I could see on my screen. It's difficult to imagine how I found it so amazing when it all seems so mundane these days. I guess I can relate it to a story that I was once told about my Grandfather. Apparently, the first time he was shown a radio, he walked round the back of it to see who was talking.

Anyway, after literally weeks of intensive dungeoning, dragoning, orcing and talking, I started to become bored of the game. I loved the social side of things but found the gameplay incredibly one-dimensional. However, I had invested many hours and much money in my character. Ironically, it was at this point that Compunet and British Telecom contrived to mismanage their relationship and close M.U.D. down. In its place was another game called Federation II which I steadfastly refused to play, waiting instead on the promised return of M.U.D. It never happened and after a few months I started to pay more attention to the positive feedback emanating from this new game. One point came across to me very clearly; there were no dungeons, dragons or orcs in Federation II and the players were having an impact on the game world; something that never happened in M.U.D.

So it wasn't until the Autumn of 1988 that I first logged into Federation II and read the words, "Knock hard. Life is deaf". And as an incredibly handsome young simian once commented, "Avoiding a cliche is not at all easy, you know" (well no-one else was going to quote me were they!). Fed II not only avoided the cliche of the time, it turned and kicked it up the backside on its way past.