[retro-games] Masters of their Universe — extract from Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford about the creation of the computer game Elite … ‘In 1982, popularised science hadn’t yet risen above the horizon in Britain as a cultural phenomenon. No chaos theory as a universal reference point; not much evolutionary biology, since Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were only then beginning to make their mark on public consciousness; no cosmology deployed à la Stephen Hawking as a modern replacement for religious truths. In particular, computing in its DIY phase didn’t resonate as it would later. You wouldn’t have found French literary theorists writing about cyberspace in 1982, any more than they’d have written about household plumbing. Computers weren’t glamorous. The result of all this was that what Braben and Bell achieved together while they were at Cambridge was, effectively, invisible.’
Extract from Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2003 at 7:48 am and is filed under Books, Computer Games.
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Wow. Reading the excerpt had the same effect that reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did to me. The difference being that I want to program a game instead of fix a bike.
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