

John Carmack's First Game - santaclaus
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2015/04/game-183-shadowforge-1989.html

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brey

      ... similarities I found between me and John Carmack ...
      We both experimented with burglary as teenagers (he was caught; I wasn't).
    

That's a curious phrasing - echos of 'experimented with drugs' or
'experimented with my sexuality': positive, life-affirming actions,
discovering your true self.

Does one discover one's inner burglar?

~~~
spiritplumber
I would steal games from stores, take them home, copy them (using this
ridiculously clunky 1x IDE cd copier that had to be mounted outside the
computer in a frame and held up by elastic bands, to get a decent yield), and
return them.

I got caught, funny enough when returning a disc rather than stealing it.

This turned into my first job as the guy agreed to not make a big deal out of
is if I used my Ape50 to do deliveries for him after school for a bit. After
the bit ended, we decided we got along, so I kept working there afternoons
until I graduated, and two years fulltime after graduation.

Then the place closed because a Euronics opened two streets over, and I moved
to the US for university.

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pdw
The CRPG Addict also played _Wraith: The Devil's Demise_, his second game:

[http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2015/04/game-184-wraith-
devils...](http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2015/04/game-184-wraith-devils-
demise-1990.html)

And _Dark Designs_, a more elaborate RPG, one of his first games for Softdisk:

[http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/01/game-133-dark-
designs-...](http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/01/game-133-dark-designs-i-
grelminars.html)

[http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/07/game-152-dark-
designs-...](http://crpgaddict.blogspot.be/2014/07/game-152-dark-designs-ii-
closing-gate.html)

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welder
This brings back memories of my first game
([http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/179/17999.html](http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/179/17999.html))
I was around 12 years old. It seems pointless now, but was fun when I built
it.

~~~
prezjordan
Awesome, is it written in TI-BASIC?

~~~
welder
Yes :)

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tmerr
>We both got horrible grades in high school despite having the intelligence to
do better

I'm not sure that's true, other sites report he got a 4.0.

[http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-
John.htm...](http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.html)
[http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Carmack](http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Carmack)

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SCdF
On a similar note I've found Ben 'Yahtzee / ZeroPunctuation' Crowshaw's "Ego
Review" series pretty fascinating, where his friend replays the games he made
when he was a kid, and they commentate over it.

The first one is here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlELK_3dGm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlELK_3dGm0)

~~~
reidrac
I find remarkable he still has his games.

The very few I made myself in gwbasic died with the double side floppy disks
(720KB!) were I had them stored. At some point at the end of the 90s I tried
to recover them, but it was already too late.

It's a shame. Not that they were good games in anyway, but that's how
nostalgia works :)

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santaclaus
I remember having to buy a Ti 83 calculator for ninth grade math, and all we
used them for was programming text adventures. I'm waiting for the indie game
dev community to pick up on the trend of Ti 83 revivals!

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sehugg
So much Ultima influence! Some of those tiles look, er, very familiar :)

I wonder if Carmack ever dreamed that in 20 years he'd be building rockets and
the author of Ultima would have traveled to space. (Incidentally, in Ultima
II, you _could_ travel into space!)

~~~
bitwize
You _are_ dealing with one of the coauthors of "Dangerous Dave in Copyright
Infringement"!

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jastanton
Has anyone played it? Is it fun?

~~~
michaelx386
There's a video of someone playing Shadowforge and Wraith on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7py_FGQ5tU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7py_FGQ5tU)

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chrisjohn93
Awesome

