Chris Crawford on Game Design

Early Sound and Music

This goes way back: In the 1960s, long before many readers of this book were born, there were no personal computers (horrors!). Instead, we had mainframe computers, great big monsters taking up entire rooms, with a clutch of incantation-chanting priests hovering about, serving their every need. Humble users would submit “jobs” on decks of punched cards, which the priests would feed into card readers. The computer would execute the job and print out results, which would be placed in a little mailbox for the user to pick up later. Sometimes the turnaround time for these jobs was rather long; I remember one professor at UC Davis complaining that the campus computer center was so slow that it would be faster for him to drive ...