[10] Shiny Happy People

 On November 27, 1987, the number one song in the US was, appropriately, "(I've Had) The Time of My Life", the dance finale from Jerry Orbach's best acting work until Law & Order.  The day before, Scott Miller released the first in a series that basically started a game company.

The Kroz series of games was the result of Miller having written a couple of Infocom-inspired text adventures, and realizing how much more could be achieved on the computer instead, he upped the game.  His own words:

"After writing [two] Infocom-inspired text adventure games, Beyond the Titanic and Supernova, I decided it was time to step up my game and make something with graphics.  This was style four-color CGA days, and while 16-color EGA was making headway, the vast majority of PCs didn't have it.  So, I decided to try making a game with ASCII characters, using a lot of the high-end character, many of which worked quite well for games back then." - Scott Miller, from the release notes with the Kroz source code released in 2009.

I've already mentioned in my first post the game Castle Adventure, and this was likely also an inspiration to this and another game series we will discuss.  

Skipping to the end here

Kroz is Zork spelled backwards, and although that was an influence to Miller, a bigger impact was made on him with the game Rogue, a 1984 game that looks very similar, but has little AI and leaves more to random chance.

[09] I Lost on Jeopardy, Baby

Edit: Sadly, this was posted barely a day before the death of longtime Jeopardy host Alex Trebek.  Rest in peace.

So this brings me to the 5th grade, when I won a few prizes on a Nickelodeon show.

It was a show called Total Panic, a variety show somewhat modeled after the original You Can't Do That on Television episodes aired in Canada in the late 1970s, before being picked up by Nick.  Amongst the fun, I did a call-in contest where I won a Casio keyboard, a 110 camera, and a trip to Busch Gardens, Florida -- and their water park, known at the time as Wild Water Kingdom.

The tech story isn't in Florida, although the 7 day, 6 night trip was too short (and my parents made me give up a couple of those days to visit my grandparents, losing valuable theme park time).  No, it's the flight back, when my piece of luggage was lost.  It took them a while to find it -- and then had to drive it over 2 hours north from the airport -- so it wasn't until weeks after the trip that I was able to enjoy two bargain-bin games that I bought there.  For CGA monitors, in DOS, here's Pat Sajack and Alex Trebeck.