[HN Gopher] Below the Root: A story, a computer game and my life...
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Below the Root: A story, a computer game and my lifelong obsession
(2015)
Author : olvy0
Score : 29 points
Date : 2024-08-05 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.stahlmandesign.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.stahlmandesign.com)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I absolutely loved Below the Root when I was a kid. I definitely
| shared the author's sense of wonder when playing. The game world
| felt expansive and mysterious. It was probably the closest to an
| "open world game" I ever played on an Apple II.
|
| I'm excited to try out the Commodore 64 version now that I know
| it was the original.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Wow... quite the obsession. BtR was a fun game, and I am looking
| forward to playing The Dreamsong!
| joemi wrote:
| The only link I clicked on in the article was supposed to be for
| The Dreamsong, and it was broken. But I found the game here:
| https://www.thedreamsong.com/
| satisfice wrote:
| I almost worked on this game, but I was burnt out so I took a
| break from all that. I ended up doing some play testing on it.
|
| This was the kind of game Dale excelled at designing. He would do
| the original versions and his small crew would do the porting.
| One coder per platform.
|
| The art was done by our go-to artist. I forget his name but he
| had a whimsical, clown-like personality.
|
| Dale drew a lot of counterculture-type people into his orbit. He
| was the California stereotype, that way. But he lived clean, no
| drugs or even alcohol that I ever saw at his parties, and it's
| such a fluke that he died so young.
|
| Dale taught me to drive and is the reason I got good at
| harmonica. He was a wonderful man.
| throwanem wrote:
| I had this (the Apple II edition) as a kid, but I didn't have the
| books it was based on, and between that and the poor controls
| combined with easy and easily repeatable failure states, it felt
| extremely opaque and unfair - especially because there so
| obviously _was_ something there of interest and possibly even
| lasting value, in the sense any story can have that, but the game
| was so poor at _being a game_ as to reliably frustrate my every
| attempt to find out what that "something" might actually be.
|
| I suppose I'm glad there were people with whom it landed very
| well, but I also wouldn't exactly call it a must-play, or even a
| classic. Much more I'd class it alongside the middle- and late-
| period Sierra games, which likewise remain fondly remembered
| among those few who were able to think sufficiently along with
| the particular logic of their authorship - and among all us
| others, not so fondly.
| debo_ wrote:
| This game blew my mind when I discovered it in an Apple computer
| lab as a 7 year old. I emailed back and forth with Zilpha Keatley
| Snyder for years, and she always replied within 24 hours of an
| email, like clockwork.
|
| I read the books much later (in my 20s) and while stylistically I
| found them hard to get through, I can see how they also would
| have stretched my mind if I'd found them as a tyke.
| samstave wrote:
| We are of the same ilk!. Same age. My buddy Morgan had a tandy
| 1000 and got a modem. Long story short:
|
| We discovered BBSing from Lake Tahoe to San Jose to play the Pit,
| and all sorts of other things.. PCLink, $926 long distance bill
| leads to month long grounding, and me convincing mydad that he
| needed a computer to run his business... and a printer!.... oh
| yeha... and a modem. O.o
|
| Rolls nat 20!
|
| Here I am But my first love then was Ultima ][ -- Bards tale...
|
| Morgan retired from the gaming world as a top exec at several of
| the AAA gaming cos...
|
| All because these games that game the perfect mix of reality.
| Fantasy Reality (that which you see in the computer) and Full
| Blown Imagination.
|
| You internal visual overlay still carried a huge % of the game
| experience.
|
| Something I Lament for todays youth. Need to start "Cult of the
| Dip Switch" 4K?? - EGA ALL THE WAY!
| 01100011 wrote:
| Played the original on c64(well, 128d) back in '87 and it blew me
| away. I grabbed the disk image a few months ago and played a bit
| and I'm still impressed. I love the story, the music, the
| graphics and the gameplay. It's just a really stellar,
| underappreciated game.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| I have also been obsessed with "Below the Root" since it came
| out.
|
| Dale Disharoon/DeSharone had an odd insight into textures. Look
| at the ladders. Look at the vines, both those that can be climbed
| and those that can be cut with a "trencher beak". Look at the way
| the trees evoke growing wood. The visuals are much more evocative
| than should be possible at this resolution.
|
| Dale also did a Disney-licensed Apple II game based on "The
| Jungle Book" which is similar in character to "Below the Root"
| and a game based on "Alice in Wonderland". Both are strange and
| mystical and full of odd vines that remind me of the patterns
| left by the cellular automaton "Langton's Ant".
|
| All Dale's games were unfair and opaque but that was the state of
| the art.
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