Tomorrow and Yesterday

I recently completed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, a book recommended by many including the City of Chicago. The novel covers the decades long journey of two game developers, Sadie and Sam, and how their lives interact with the games they create.

A paragraph towards the end made me rethink the whole book (not a spoiler):

Well, if we’d been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn’t have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder. We would have been part of the generation who was putting floppy disks in Ziploc bags and driving the games to stores. And if we’d been born a little bit later, there would have been even greater access to the internet and certain tools, but honestly, the games got so much more complicated; the industry got so professional. We couldn’t have done as much as we did on our own.

This paragraph hearkens back to my post last week, about how the era you grew up in can affect your trajectory. But also I'm a generation older than the book's main characters, and indeed Ribbit was distributed on a floppy disk in a Ziploc bag.

The novel at its heart is about two friends making games. I was lucky to have that experience myself for a couple of years in the early 80s, with high school friend Chris Eisnaugle, working on Ribbit, Excalibur and some other games that never saw the light of day. We coded for days on end while listening to music like REO Speedwagon, and taking time off for bowling or watching early Schwarzenegger movies. Coding in assembly language on slow processors with limited graphics, taking advantage of our complementary strengths and making it work. I don't regret leaving that life behind for the theoretical wonders of computational complexity, but that doesn't mean I don't miss it.