Unwanted Commentary

I remember back when I was in technical school...it was a college, but not really...and was being introduced to the world of PC gaming on a scale previously unknown. A few of my friends and I would go to Sears on the mall to play games on the display computers. We had lowly, antiquated machines at home and these were searing, gut busting 386 & 486 machines...it was nirvana. Some of the sales people got annoyed with us, but for the most part they didn't seem to care, and a few appreciated the fact that we installed our games…it was a sort of informal swap.

One day I had gone by myself and had meandered up to the computer department, as I was in the habit of doing, and I began searching through the directories old school style...cd, backslash, etc, etc. My general strategy was to snoop through the hard drive and look for oddly named directories that might indicate a game was installed. I can still plainly recall coming across a directory called MPS, so in I went to discover the sole subdirectory named C-I-V. Not knowing what I might find I continued on into c:\mps\civ. I found the executable, named civ.exe and typed it. Countless hours of my life were forever destroyed in that instance. I had found Sid Meir's Civilization. I spent two or three hour's straight standing in front of that computer playing this game without any clue as to what I was doing.

I had one city and all I could figure out to do was make militia men and research technology, but despite that I was enthralled. Just about the time I had to leave I finally figured out how to change the building queue and the whole game was unleashed. I ended up coming back and copying the game onto two floppies and then sometime later going to Best Buy to actually buy the game so I could get the manual. (Up until that point I had to guess at the security key, sometimes I got it, sometimes I didn't). There really is no telling how many hours of my life I wasted on that game, not to mention the other unfortunate souls who I introduced to it. I know at one point I spent, literally, an entire weekend playing...straight through...I went to the bathroom and slept, that was it. Crazy, I know...but man those were the days.