My son was around three years old when we bought an Atari 400 computer with a pressure pad keyboard. The rubber membrane covering the keys was an effective deterrent to the jam sandwiches, slugs, nose pickings and the assorted refuse that would inevitably accompany a young boy to a computing session. He was therefore allowed free access, and was soon writing simple programs that would print his name or calculate the amount of garden soil he ingested in a week.
As the years rolled by, we upgraded to an Atari 800 and summer holidays were spent planning state-of-the-art computer games. To be honest, we never got round to implementing the complex ground-breaking gameplay; but we did build fabulous splash screens.
Nowadays, any self-respecting computer game will commence with a ten minute introductory movie voiced by known actors and featuring gorgeous graphics. What follows may well be rubbish, but at least it will start well. In the “old days” a game would start with a splash screen, a pretty picture which was usually trying to disguise the fact that the game was taking forever to load and you had to have something to look at in the meantime. Our games extended the concept to the logical conclusion, we had the most gorgeous splash screens, but no actual games.
It is perhaps appropriate then, that after many years working in the computer games industry, my son chose to revert to his roots and send me a splash screen he wrote as a father’s day gift. Or rather, it is a screen saver that goes splash; somewhat reminiscent of the CGI used in The Mummy movies and no doubt requiring the sort of maths that would cover a blackboard in a centre of advanced learning.
It is very cool and makes me a happy father on father’s day; even though it isn’t actually father’s day here in Thailand until December; by which time maybe he will have built a game to go behind the splash screen and he can send me that.