A long long time ago, when I was but a wee bairn, my grandfather owned a Commodore 64 computer. That’s pretty unusual for a guy born in 1921, served in WWII and the Korean War, to be embracing the technological age so early. He had a PC before our family had a PC. And my dad was a mainframe guy–he got a job in tech when they were still using punch cards and big old magnetic tape storage.
Anyway, I would rather play on the computer than listen to my parents and grandparents talk. Because that’s all they did. And they didn’t have any fun stuff like my maternal grandparents did, like a record player or fake, glowing fireplace or double swinging doors leading to the kitchen that I could burst through, pretending I was a cowboy. So somewhere in the middle of me sitting on their seventies couch, I’d anticipated a lull in the conversation so I could ask “Grandpa? Can I go play on the computer?”
It was so long ago, I don’t remember the games I played on it. The game I played most was Ghostbusters–it even played the theme song at the start with a “follow the bouncing ghost”. Never could get very far on it though. I had trouble getting the ghosts into the trap. Only rarely did I ever get to the point where I could see the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (my favorite character). And why did they give you a choice of cars to buy in the beginning, but the best car was always more than you had to spend?
Then there was Hat Trick, a 1v1 hockey game. And Paint, which was Tron, but with paintbrushes. And Batman, but that was too hard. Choplifter was pretty darn fun–you could either helicopter survivors out of there or see how hard you could crash into the mountains.
But one game was called Therapy. I can’t find records of it on sites like MobyGames, but you can play it on an online emulator. It’s entirely text-based, but it’s not a text adventure. It’s not a faux-AI like Eliza. So what kind of game is it?
Well, the instructions say it’s based on a parlor game, but a cursory search doesn’t reveal any history behind it. Basically, it’s a Mad Lib. The “doctor” prompts you with questions and you answer them, under the premise that you’re there to see the therapist about a problem. It asks you why it’s a problem, how it makes you feel. Basically as if the psychologist was a 1980s robot.
Very dumb, very repetitive. But I was a kid with imagination. So I would pretend to be all kinds of characters — Garfield, Snoopy, Alf, Marty McFly, a ghostbuster, Leonardo. And since I didn’t know what therapy was (it was the eighties–no one knew what therapy was.) my problems would always be “there is a ghost” or “I’ve traveled back in time” or other goofy shit. So instead of personal problems, I was throwing external issues at Dr. Rom. Then he would repeat what you’d written back at you, like “I noticed when I said ‘family’ you said ‘splinter’. Why do you think that is?” Which, I guess, must have been funny in my mind. Or at least entertaining enough to keep me from being a nuisance to the grown-ups.
There’s no real point to this post. It was just something fun I remembered.
