![]() ![]() I found the tricks of sorting and searching, messing with a file by changing its extension, and rummaging through the file structure of my CD-ROM games and hidden hard drive folders, and was VERY lucky I did not permanently break anything important. To begin with they were tucked away in file folders and menus that also felt like a sort of castle with secret trapdoors and hidden dungeons to find. (But don't get caught, or you will be sent to the Microsoft Excel crypts.)īut none of this mid-90s nostalgia really gets at what was so appealing to me about these little programs. And many of the games that came packaged with the operating system, like Rattler Race and Rodent’s Revenge, were adaptations of arcade-y classics, now available for slacking off in your office environment. Petz has a certain presence for its uncannily convincing AI that still manages to be both lovable and occasionally confusing in the way pet behavior often is. Some of the games I associate strongly with this period are well-known and well discussed, though often as minor and tangential to the main story of videogame history. And the amount of time I spent with each, respectively, began to shift. Gradually, the computer became more of a place for me to be, and more of a place to explore, than the outdoors was. ![]() I remember spending hours just turning on and watching that screensaver, mandating myself a certain disciplined stillness while it went on weaving methodically through the randomly generated mazes and thinking there was nothing more interesting you could do on a computer. SkiFree and Fuji Golf were included as time-killing games, and the entrancing 3D Maze screensaver also was one of the most bizarre and intriguing default elements of our computer. Many of the built-in features of Windows 95 reinforced the aspiration of simulating traversing space. I had played some floppy disc educational games on our old computer which involved moving around, like Mickey’s ABCs where you go to a funfair by pressing letters on the keyboard, but the general use of the computer was conducted via a text terminal, which was still opaque and unappealing to me at that age, even if I had picked up reading pretty quickly.īut now, when you went on the computer, you moved things around on your “desktop,” and if you had Dogz, your virtual pet could run across it and dig holes in it too. The important thing about this shift is that my internal perception of using a computer became primarily spatial. It came with games pre-installed, rather than ones that had to be inserted via a floppy disc (or sometimes a series of them!) It also had Windows 95 on it now, instead of just DOS. We got a new computer shortly after settling in to the new house, one which could read CD-ROMS. It didn’t feel like I could wander much, or had anywhere interesting to go anymore, unless I stuck to walking along or riding my bike on the roads, and even then, demonstrates my intuition that some neighbors didn’t even like that.Īs this process began and progressed outside of my home, something similar happened inside. ![]() But then, on the left, right, and finally directly behind our house in my “extra backyard” these areas were divided up and demarcated, sometimes by more physical barriers, but often just by implication, that I shouldn’t go into “someone else’s yard.” I wandered, climbed, got ticks, covered myself in dirt and grass stains, and ripped out the knees of every pair of leggings I owned. When I was 5 or 6, my family moved from a small, remote house (near neighbors were a farm and a guy who raised emus), to an apartment, and then to one of the first homes built in a new suburban development.Ī big loop of road and the first three or four homes were the only things which sketched out how the entire area would eventually be separated into lots and filled, the rest was essentially undifferentiated fields with occasional large piles of dirt left over from construction punctuating the horizon. ![]()
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