Bjarne Stroustrup: Why I Created C++ - it’s easy to forget that a few people invented how we program computers.
Looking through some code, listening to Jackie Mittoo, realizing I just spent a good 20 minutes getting a lot done entirely inside my head. Just clicking around, reminding myself of where things are, reading some docs, sipping my coffee, making decisions. Untangling a knot.
I try not to forget that everyday we are building machines with our minds, little repeatable electron storms. Keyboards convert our ideas into tiny etchings of magnetic information on a hard drive, that when played back through an electronic brain, breathe and react to stimulus. Monitors magnify that process. Isn’t crazy to think about it that way? A terminal window full of code files is just a microscope for your hard drive. You’re writing things that move a little arm around that makes tiny electromagnetic dots on it. All these things are happening all day long. We’re instructing a robotic stylus how to etch a whirring platinum disc just so.
There’s something more than just retro going on here. It’s not just an empty nostalgia, I think, that makes 8-bit games really interesting. If you put them in the context of all human creative expression, there was a really short amount of time in the 1980s and early 90s where we tried to tell a story in this crazy way, with buttons and vacuum tubes where electron cannons drew dots on a screen one line at a time. There was this really special moment where forgotten great men used the newest tools they had to tell a story. A lot of times, it was the same men coming up with the story as writing the code, and if you look at that code, it’s incredible. So far afield of the end result, you might as well be looking at hieroglyphics or ancient scrawls on pieces of bone. But they toiled in solitude, creating what most dismissed as a children’s toy, and some railed against as the downfall of their children’s future, “rotting their brains”. These nerds struggled, not just to create a story, but to create worlds with just colored squares burned into phosphorous screens sixty times every second.
When you’re playing The Legend of Zelda, the first one, the adventure plays out in platonic simplicity before your eyes, and most of the story is left to your imagination. It doesn’t break stride for cut scenes or dialog or long scrolling explanations, it just lets you in. The world around you drifts away, and you float down into this one. It’s not a literal a form of storytelling, not a clear and linear narrative. It’s vague, only partially completed, and simplified to a point where it’s experienced almost subconsciously.
When you’re playing Super Mario Bros. and you get to those levels with the really narrow cliffs, as you leap across them, don’t you lean forward in your seat? Do you remember your dad playing NES when you were a kid? Remember how he’d move the controller around in space when he jumped? You become hypnotized, tensing up as you leap over the last few and then finally you land and get to the flag at the end. The music plays, and you’ve done it. And as you lean back from the screen, you’re leaning back into reality. You look around to find that you’re on a couch in a living room. For a second, though, you were completely immersed. For a second, with the simplest possible symbols and blips, you were a plumber just barely surviving an impossible leap.
A lot of us look fondly at these old games now because they’re cozy mementos from childhood, but many decades from now people will look with a much deeper affection. They’ll see these games as early artifacts of a species that was just beginning to teach its machines to tell stories. Those early programmers created a new kind of visual narrative with flecks of glowing color on flickering screens. 20,000 years ago people murmured in low voices by lonely campfires, and 20 years ago I sat with my cousins, volume muted late at night, watching my bedroom flicker around me with warm triforce afterglow. Can’t it all be part of the same long story?
