McCracken remembers this era fondly because, “Nearly everyone who was serious about computer games tried writing their own, regardless of the results.”
Harry McCracken is not the name of a Cold War superspy, but a man who was once a developer for Radio Shack’s TRS-80 microcomputer. McCracken recently went back to have a look at his first game, Arctic Adventure, which he wrote when he was 16 around 1980-81 –a text adventure inspired by the work of Scott Adams, a pioneering designer of the Adventure series.