Two Guys from Andromeda
I’m not sure I would have found the same career I enjoy today had I not been accidentally bootstrapped by the Andromedans!
After 20 years, those crazy bastards are back!
They want to build a new game and inspire a whole new generation of would be technology and sci-fi geeks!
Their kickstarter project is well on its way, but they still need another $100,000 in the next three days to meet their funding goal!
Isn’t this worth the buckazoids?!
Some details are certainly lost to time, but I can credit the Space Quest series for a lot.
For starters, gaming based around a text-based parser is definitely the root of my ridiculous touch-typing speeds.
My naive desire to customize the games lead me to buying my first book on C++ at the age of 11! Who knew this C++ “program” didn’t actually allow you to edit your games?! What a frustrating path that was! “Okay, I get it, this is how you print “Hello, World!” now how do I add a level to this game?!”
I didn’t learn the fundamentals of software development until much later, but getting these damn Space Quest games to work was largely responsible for the growth of my own basic knowledge of computing. Us MS-DOS gamers had several rites of passage we had to contend with… SET BLASTER? What?! Freeing conventional memory by writing a custom boot diskette, you say?
After only a short time being connected to the shiny new world wide web, I discovered Jess Morrissette’s web site “The Virtual Broomcloset.” Contacting this random stranger from the interweb, via e-mail, lead to him revealing to my young primitive mind that HTML files were nothing more than plain old ASCII – anybody equipped with any variety of text editor could create and manipulate web sites. Imagine that!
I don’t know how big the gap was between first contact and writing my own (lousy) Space Quest fan site, but the comment’s contained within the HTML files of what remains of the site mention a launch on June 21, 1996! Would I have found motivation to seed my web development skills from some other source?
Speaking of said web site, one of the “Two Guys” – Scott Murphy, was even cool enough to humour me with an interview! How cool is that? Procrastination set in and I never did end up posting it, but hey! Very cool nonetheless!
Update!
We made it! #SpaceVenture is officially funded! Thank you so much everyone! No way this could have made it without you! tgakick.com
— Guys From Andromeda (@AndromedaGuys) June 11, 2012