Sixteen years ago, in Abu Dhabi, when I was all of eleven years of age and an amateur QBasic programmer, I sneaked into the storeroom of the small computer shop where I was learning the craft. Sifting through tens of shoeboxes holding floppy disks ( the 5.25″ variety), I found a disk innocuously titled ‘Trinity’. The name stood out – it sounded more interesting than ‘Lotus 1-2-3′ or ‘Wordperfect’ to an eleven year old. Holding it at the corners so as to touch as little dust as possible ( the storeroom was rather musty) I took it to Omar, my then instructor and mentor. He looked it for a couple of seconds before his eyes went wide.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was back there in the storeroom.”
“My friend, you have found a treasure!”
Indeed. He set it up on the computer allotted to me – an XT machine with 640K memory and 20MB storage, and I was hooked to programming for life.
Released in 1986, the game is old; it is an Infocom interactive fiction text adventure which has arguably never been equalled in terms of quality. The writing is excellent; it was enough to draw in an eleven year and still can after all these years, more than the current breed of high graphics, low intellect games on the market today.
It inspired me to write my first game; not an interactive fiction text adventure, but a boxing death math arena called ‘Cestus : Immortal Combat’. It had a bug I never fixed; neither player would die even after his health bar was whittled down to zero, thus the play on words.
Time went by, and I lost the disk, and the source of the game I wrote. Both have remained unavailable to me until now.
I found Trinity at Home Of The Underdog, a site that archives abandonware games. This one comes with a manual as well, something I didn’t have back then.
Playing the game again has inspired me to try writing a second version of Cestus – this time with no bugs. That will be a story for another day.
A beautiful story…I remember him and those classes we took..and watching you play Mortal Kombat and Tekken…heheh..those were the days…