Roberta’s husband Ken was an adept programmer, but the available technology made drawing a challenge. She decided to write her own game-one with pictures as well as text. The true lunatics began to think about how they could do it better.” Roberta, playing from home, was one of those lunatics. It’s estimated that it set the entire computer industry back two weeks. It may not sound exciting today, but at the time it was enough to hook anyone with access to a home terminal.Įarly programmer Tim Anderson told video game magazine The New Zork Timesin 1985 that when the most famous early game, Colossal Cave, landed at MIT where he worked, “everybody spent a lot of time doing nothing but solving the game. Those commands were then transmitted via the ’70s-version of the Internet and the next step in the game was then typed back to you. So, commands (“CROSS BRIDGE,” “TAKE BOTTLE,” “THROW EGGS AT TROLL”) were typed on paper like a typewriter. In the ’70s, home computers-of which there were very few-had no screens. Gameplay happened line by slowly transmitted line and was only visualized by your imagination. Like any computer worth its salt, you could use a Teletype to play games in this case, text-based adventure games.
#MYSTERY HOUSE GAME DESIGNER PORTABLE#
This portable terminal allowed Ken remote access to the room-sized mainframe computers he worked with during the day. Their first computer was a teletype machine-a device that looked like a typewriter on steroids and used something called an acoustic coupler to access the early Internet. The Williams’ home in Simi Valley, CA, had far more hardware than the average ’70s household. They married before they were 20, promptly had two children, and Roberta became a stay-at-home mom while Ken got a job as a programmer for IBM. He pulled me out when I was ready to go downhill,” she told Levy. I didn’t want to go to college or do anything but party. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. He worked from the time he was 12 and was really good at whatever he did. “When I met Ken, he was very straight, very responsible. But that all changed when, at 17, she met 16-year-old Ken Williams. Not at all,” she told author Steven Levy in his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. “I didn’t have a lot of friends…I didn’t like who I was. But despite her seeming unwillingness to revisit her past, it is important to tell her story, and make sure her groundbreaking work isn’t lost to history.Īs a teenager, Roberta was an avid reader, with a love of fantasy stories that transported her away to better, more exciting places. These days, retired from the business she birthed and leaving it far behind-she didn’t respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this story-she spends her time travelling the world by boat, together with her husband. But beneath the bits and bytes is the unlikely heroine of a growing feminist movement in tech, an unexpectedly savvy business figure whose unconventional process pioneered a new wave in game making, and a self-described “lazy,” directionless young woman whose ambitions ballooned until they burst. Most accounts of her contributions to computer game design dwell on the childlike compositions and stick-figure caricatures she brought to the screen. And while she couldn’t have known it then, Williams’ hobby would become the origin of graphic design in computing and technology-two industries that now dominate life as we know it. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine a computer or video game without visuals, but the idea had to start somewhere. It was 1980 when Roberta Williams, a shy, soft-spoken housewife with little coding or design experience, rose from obscurity by designing Mystery House, the first-ever computer game with graphics. They were monochrome, ridiculously rudimentary, and they blew everyone away. But it wasn’t just the text, flashing on the screen of an 8-bit Apple II that shot out like a call from the wild-it was the graphics. It was the same way all text-based computer games started: a bare-bones setup and an invitation to venture forth, uncover clues, and win the game. To most, it might read like the beginning of an odd and boring story, but the format will be familiar to anyone over 40 who ever dabbled in microcomputing. Two simple sentences and a cursor, blinking like a heartbeat, awaiting your command.
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