The History Of Gaming, Part Four: The Welcome Tape Again
Right, now that we’re finally done with POEM, let’s check through the rest of the Welcome Tape. Once again, ‘cpmisalive’ at YouTube delivers something we can actually see with our human eyes.
We come right back in after the extreme yawnery of TELEPHONE with BAT ‘N’ BALL, which wonder of wonders is an actual game. Of a sort. It’s sort of like Pong – or rather Breakout – but the ceiling moves lower and lower until either you run out of space to manouvre or you die of boredom. It tries to add the ‘educational value’ that is the hallmark of the Welcome Tape by giving you the commands that you need to draw the bat, the ball and the walls but strangely skimps a little on detailing the bit that makes things actually happen. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing when you’re dealing with the awesome power of the BBC Micro Model B! Note the awesome sound effects in particular.
Presumably that awful flat beeping was to prepare the virgin ears of the unsullied young for MUSIC. But MUSIC like no MUSIC that any human has heard before, for it came from the BBC MICRO SPEAKER! There was no telling which letter on the computer keyboard corresponded with what note as they all played something utterly divorced from any scale known to man or God and the resultant polyphonic diarrhoea was shat onto the screen in wholly alien tongue. In fact it looked a lot like the sheet music from the Excessus Machine in Barbarella, so presumably it was meant to make new users spoff half to death at the amazing sonic power of the Beeb. It’s telling that ‘cpmisalive’ spends less time here than he does on CLOCK.
CLOCK, as you can see, comes in three varieties, each of which it draws painstakingly for you – analogue, analogue and digital, and just digital. One of these takes less time to draw than the others. Coincidentally, one of them is considerably more rubbish. This would probably have been the first time this kind of analogue clock display would have appeared on the computer screen, but the problem here is that in order to learn the time you have to spend ten minutes loading up a tape cassette and during this process the time will almost certainly change. It’s no good for boiling an egg, for example. Not a soft-boiled one anyhow.
PHOTO. I’ve made my point earlier about how the Welcome Disc, for the fancy disc driiiive, sucks all the life out of these things. Digitised Photograph. No wonder it just lies on the screen like a squashed turd. This is much like CLOCK, in that what is now a useful part of every computer in existence was then just a useless bit of emphemera seemingly jammed on the tape to fill space. Like PATTERNS.
PATTERNS.
God.
It’s… it’s like the BBC Micro being sick on you. I don’t know. I’m coming back to this after a day of work on comics projects and all I’m seeing is MUSIC, CLOCK, PATTERNS… this is the Dark Side Of The Welcome Tape. This is where the bloom came off the rose. This is where even the idealistic young minds watching through the window into the future sat and thought: we know. We know. It can draw lines. Yes. Thank you. What else? What else?
The Welcome Tape isn’t very good, is it?
Disappointment sets in. This too, is a function of the Welcome Tape, for it has much to teach us. it has taught us the meaning of joy – now it teaches the meaning of despair. How can we go out and spend money on new games to feed our hunger if we are always playing and re-playing the Welcome Tape? So the cycle begins here – early joy, wide-eyed amazement, quickly turning to disappointment as even this marvellous new aquisition is not enough to satisfy us. We must go out and buy more games. More and more games. Then, as they evolve, more and more computers to play them on. More and more. It’s a cycle that’s brought us to our current technological paradise, and it’s a cycle that began here, with the Welcome Tape. Like the apple that brought the downfall of Eden, the Welcome Tape gives us knowledge, but the price is our happiness.
Oh, foul serpent of the British Broadcasting Corporation! Oh time, Oh God, Oh fall of man!
Moving on.
KINGDOM. An actual game again and one that’s familiar to all of us. it’s primitive, but it works. The object of the game, contrary to the instructions, is not to keep your village prosperous and happy. That is far too easy, thanks to the creators of the Welcome Tape wanting to make this first true ‘gaming’ experience a happy one. No, the object of KINGDOM is to KILL THEM ALL through your poor leadership. Watch as the yellow river slowly floods the plains! Do you have no workers in the fields, so your people starve, or do you leave them out so that the river destroys them? Or might the river get in the way of the thieves who would otherwise creep from the mountains (marked MOUNTAINS) to pillage and kill? There are so many choices and such a short time to kill your entire population. I managed to do it inside a year once, through good fortune and careful planning.
This is a style of gaming that’s continued long since – Sim City, with the monsters you could call up at a moments notice to ravage your painstakingly-built town, Die Hard Trilogy on the playstation, where you could plough into sidewalks filled with pedestrians until your windscreen was awash in blood, and of course The Sims.
More on the Sims tomorrow.
Finally, BIORHYTHMS - ending the tape with some seventies psychobabble. Biorythms is at best protoscience, a hypothetical fancy. It has its proponents, but it’s become lost inamongst the great wash of holistic medicines and pseudofacts that babble over us day by day. But back at the turn of the eighties, it was presumably seen as science fact. More from the world of tomorrow. Another chunk of the golden future – even something that might become as boring to us as CLOCK or PHOTO, in time. Were we meant to have Biorhythm-calculators on our desks, charting our personal rhythms from moment to moment? What other tools did the greatest computer minds of 1981 imagine us having? What other dreams? Did we achieve them? Did we go beyond? Or have we taken a path away, into darkness, that great flash of optimism and hope decayed?
Are we living in the future the Welcome Tape was supposed to welcome us to?
Who can say?
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The History Of Gaming takes a break now, but will be HULKINUED at a later date. In the meantime, we’re moving forward in time to The Sims tomorrow, to chart the strange case of a man who we will know only as Mr. F.
