Fight or Flight

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the final quarter being dropped into the world’s first commercial video game, for it was in May of 1979 that Galaxy Game was removed from the Coffee House café at Stanford’s Tresidder student union. I spent a good part of five years feeding coins into Galaxy’s wondrous console, and in return it taught me and several other Silicon Valley denizens valuable lessons that laid the groundwork for much of what we have done since. I met Galaxy Game in the Summer of 1974. My family had just moved to Palo Alto and I had no friends, so my brother and I rode our bikes around the Stanford campus looking for things to do. I was in 8th grade and the bowling alley got boring quickly, but next door, amidst students and lattes (also a novelty at the time) stood two large consoles, side by side, with odd-looking little black screens. Behind those screens sat a DEC PDP-11/20 powering a riveting game built on a simple concept: use a joystick and a couple of buttons ...

Frodo: Aaarrgghh!!! Sam: It’s me. It’s your Sam. Don’t you know your Sam? Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam. Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? Sam: But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something. Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam? Sam: There’s some good in this world, ...