and my first real girlfriend, Shelagh (aplogies to Rachel, she was real too, but I didn’t give up computers for her) broke up my group of friends like Yoko Ono to the beatles, only Shelagh was much more beautiful than Yoko and we were not the beatles. Not even close, just a small grouping of geeks. In any case, before Shelagh I was really into computers. My best friend, Aaron and I used to spend hours learning how to program, playing games, discovering bulletin board system, you name it. I loosely refer to it as being into computers back then, because this was the day of the Apple ][+ and home computers where so new that that was what we really were into. The whole group (we now call our old selves the ‘Slush Cat gang’ because we hung around the slurpee machine at highschool that sold these substandard slurpees that were known from time immemorial as ‘slush cats’. I don’t think there was a sign on the machine, nor a picture of a cat, so I have no idea how they were named, but that is what they were called, and although we would never admit it then, that is what we are called) was into computers.
So, among the things I discovered in those days was an adventure game called ‘Mission Impossible’. This was a text adventure where you had to tell the program your next action using 2 words each time-no more. The game was brilliant because you needed to solve a mystery and in so doing a story unfolded. You not only had to use your brain to figure out the puzzles, but more importantly some times, to figure out how to do it with 2 words at a time.
So my best friend and I stayed up all night and solved ‘Mission Impossible’. It was great. Later on I discovered that Scott Adams had made some other adventures and I tracked down a best of boxed set that had a half a dozen-remember, this is way before the internet and we never really had any computer game stores. From time to time one would open and then it would close, so finding computer games was no easy task. In any case, in the collection, there was a ghost town, a pyramid, a carnival, and I am sure others that I am forgetting. I solved them all (probably with Aaron, although I don’t quite remember). There was a game in that collection, Savage Island, part 1 and 2. These were for experts only. I remember playing that game and only getting about 2 minutes in before being stumped. I spent hours trying to get unstumped, but I never did. I was beaten by a computer game.
Yesterday Aaron emailed me. He has found the game online. Sure, there are also cheats and walkthrought, but I will not look at them. Aaron and I are going to relive our youthful glory and change the past by beating this game.
2 things. Yes, you didn’t know that I was that big of a geek in my youth (and now in my post youth) and normally I don’t hold on to failures this tightly, but for some reason…
The game can be found here for those who would like to solve it
Savage Island Part 1
but I highly recommend that you start with a little bit of mission impossible. Look at the picture if you need a hint to start with:
Mission Impossible
