You have to keep in mind the cost of goods, tweak your marketing, make sure you’re putting out a good product, make wise investments at the right time, make sure you have enough staff on hand but not so much they bleed you dry, and in the case of Dope Wars, make sure you have enough guns on hand to beat the cops when they inevitably try to shake you down (okay, so I haven’t put that last bit to use in my business). These are the games where you’re essentially running a business. I also remember one called Fish Hatchery. Here’s something I realized recently, though: Despite the zillion times in high school my dad told me to get off the computer and go to bed already, some of these games actually taught me stuff.Įspecially Dope Wars, Lemonade Stand and RollerCoaster Tycoon. (I went on to two years of service with AmeriCorps and completed my degree at Empire State College a few years later, though.) For a number of factors, but some of them perhaps slightly Sims-related, I did drop out of college. I just completely cracked out on The Sims, night and day. I didn’t drink a lot in college or get into drugs. It’s actually a little disturbing, the hypnotic effect it has on me. Hearing the background music sends me into a bizarre happy trance. I can still remember exactly what to do for the first 100 turns or so, because I died so many times playing it.Īs a young adult, I missed a lot of early morning college courses because I stayed up all night playing The Sims. I am fairly certain that I spent years on end engrossed in the text-based adventure game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Later on, we spent hours on end with Word Rescue, Jazz Jackrabbit, Commander Keen, Carmen Sandiego and even Hugo’s House of Horrors, Quake and Doom (not every game was educational!). We wrote newsletters and stories on Creative Writer with McZee, and my first digital art was in Microsoft Paint. When I was little, I had a children’s book called Katie and the Computer that explained ROM, bytes and stuff. My dad was one of the first people around to have an Atari system, and so from an early age (as you can see from the photos) we were playing Shamus, Fooblitzky, Seven Cities of Gold (AMAZE THE NATIVES!), and other favorites. Center - the country life lent itself to a good amount of boredom, too. While my sister and I did our fair share of stuff straight out of the Berenstain Bears - playing in the woods, going to friends’ houses and biking down to the Rec.
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