What Did We Do Before the Internet?

Back in 1991 there was a gem of an adventure game called the Day of the Tentacle. Was I only 2 back then? No,  maybe I was just a tad bit older than that.  Those were the days, when I worshiped something called the Sound Blaster card and it cost almost 300 bucks and games came in Floppies and I used my modem to dial onto the BBS  just to play Text-based RPGs with my friends and a 256 color GIF file took 10 minutes to download.

I was stuck, many many times, getting through my beloved adventures.  I remember churning my brains out and clicking on every pixel on screen and combining every item possible. Sometimes it would be days before I made any actual progress. I was enamored with patience, a quality I seem to lack nowadays.

I remembered calling the Sierra-Hot-Line when I was stuck at King’s Quest and having my Mom yelled at me when she saw the phone bill.

I remembered making my Dad drive me to the mall so I could get to the bookstore and read the hint book.

I remembered writing Scorpia (she was an editor in Computer Gaming World who ran a column answering letters) and checking the mailbox everyday waiting for her reply just so I could “unstuck” myself.

Those days are long gone and forever lost and buried in our nostalgia. What do people do nowadays? We put this Day of the Tentacle speed run video on YouTube, and let the world be proud of what we can accomplish in a mere 21 minutes, while years ago it probably took me weeks, if not months.  I look back at those days, with some degree of forlorn remorse. Have we progressed? Or have we made a huge step backwards? The golden days of adventuring is gone, and I feel like an old hag listening to oldies and complaining how worthless current music is while the next generation mock me with their ignorant laughter.

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