Every once in awhile, I get this idea in my head that I'm some kind of computer programmer. I then spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about creating a free online computer game similar to what I abandoned more than two and half years ago.

Computer Programming

I know a thing or two about PHP, JavaScript, Ajax and database programming. It doesn't make me computer programmer. In my opinion, a computer programmer are people who do it for a living, whether they for someone else or themselves.

My programming history started with learning BASIC on a C-64 sometime in 1987. I eventually moved up to assembly language on the C-64 and C-128 computers and felt that I had mastered it, with the help of the late Jim Butterfield (who died in 2007). Commodore-based bulletin board systems (BBS) sprang up all over the place in the 1980s, long before the Internet became available to the general public, and most were using some variation of his "string thing" assembly language routines.

I ran a C-128 BBS from 1992 to 1998, while still in the military, and made my own modifications to the code. For me, getting on the Internet for the first time in 1994 or 1995 was a step back in knowledge. The Worldwide Web was an ugly place that most people couldn't even get to without the aid of a third-party program since Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) wasn't designed to work with the Internet — Microsoft hadn't become involved with the Internet yet. Netscape Navigator (version 1.0 or 1.1) was the only browser that seemed to be available and the things we expect to see on the web these days didn't even exist or were in their most rudimentary forms. HTML was confusing to programmers at first because "gotos" and subroutines couldn't be used with it.

Sometime before the turn of the century, I postulated (in online forums) that web-based games should be viable if the pages were coded correctly. After being told it couldn't be done by some people who are somewhat famous today, I left it alone at that.

The Farmer's Daughter

A lot of things changed, and quite rapidly. Flash-based games started appearing on the web and more and more people became involved with scripting languages like PHP and JavaScript. Ajax seems to be a favorite hybrid of JavaScript and XML manipulation (but it's not limited XML). In essence, web-based games are not only possible, they're fairly popular.

In late 2006, I spent about a month programming a web-based replica of the infamous "The Farmers Daughter", a raunchy, text-based computer adventure game that had been widely popular among early Commodore computer enthusiasts. Once I figured out how to make the pages reload and store the data in sessions in such a way that it would work almost exactly like the BASIC version, I completed 90 percent of it before quitting.

I used a C-64 emulator to run a disk-image version of "The Farmers Daughter" armed with a "walk through" that I found someone online in order to find what all the intended errors and what commands would be required to finish the game. I must have played the game from start to finish more than a hundred times before losing interest in completing the conversion. I wasn't very good with Ajax and the interface was clunky. There were way too many page loads required. Now, more than two and a half years later, I'm sure I could make an online text adventure game of some kind that would actually be pretty smooth and fun to play.

Then I Woke Up

In an era where consoles like various iterations of the X-Box, PlayStation, Nintendo whatever dominate the minds of both online and offline "gamers", where PC gamers spend incredible amounts of money on their computers and assorted components, and where web surfers occasionally play Flash-based games, a simple web-based text adventure game would probably be an exercise in futility.

It doesn't matter if it' a free computer game. It wouldn't be popular with anyone but people of my generation and older and then it would only be popular for a very short time. Unless… the game continually changes. A friend of mine used to play an online game (that wasn't free) that kept people addicted to it by having it constantly mutate, kind of like how modern computer viruses tend to mutate.

In my mind, something like this would require too much effort and it doesn't fit in with my master plan.

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