A Fun Look Back

I started playing video games when I was a kid. The first, Transylvania, was a text-only choose your own adventure-style game that I laboriously typed my way through on an original Macintosh. Later, I enjoyed the first-person adventure games published by Sierra and Lucas Arts (Space Quest, King’s Quest, etc).

I shared this interest with my ex-husband. When the available hardware still allowed, we enjoyed replaying the games of our childhood, carefully loading the endless floppy disks into the drive to advance the story. For a few halcyon years, the industry was still releasing titles that focused on humor and problem-solving (instead of eradicating some pixilated enemy) and the technology advanced so that ten disks were replaced with a few CDs.

And then the interest in those types of games waned and production shifted to first-person shooters and huge multi-player games. And my interest faded.

Until last week, when the music in a show that Brock and I were watching reminded me of Monkey Island, a series of games that I absolutely loved playing with my ex. On a whim, I Googled the game and discovered that programmers had reworked one of the releases into an app. An app that is supported on my computer.

And so for three days, I climbed into my time machine and again navigated Guybrush Threepwood through his attempts to become a mighty pirate. As I worked my way through the various puzzles, the memories of solving them with my ex came to the surface. But you know what? It was okay. Good, even. Just fun, plain and simple:)

I’ve decided that it’s probably for the best that the other games remain unavailable. It’s much harder to justify time spent playing as a responsible adult!