Kelton Flinn - 1970s University Mainframe Games

1970s University Mainframe Games

Like Marc Blank, Will Crowther, Don Daglow and Gregory Yob, Flinn and Taylor were key innovators in the 1970s university gaming culture, where students played for free on college mainframe computers. Flinn took advantage of his pursuit of an advanced degree (a PhD in Applied Mathematics) to build a long series of games across his undergraduate and graduate school career. Most students lost all access to computers after graduation in the days before personal computers were invented, but Flinn's extended years of study gave him the chance to build a large body of major works.

Key games Flinn and Taylor created during this time include:

• Air (1977–1979) — a text air combat game that foreshadowed Air Warrior. The first version was created in 1977 and worked on through 1979. As Flinn has said: "If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, AIR was the text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D on the terminal using ASCII graphics. It was an acquired taste."
• S — a multi-player space colonization and combat game (1979). Flinn and Taylor wrote the game over their summer vacations at the University of Virginia. Mega Wars III would be based on S after they founded Kesmai.
• Dungeons of Kesmai (1980) — a text adventure game with very little puzzle solving and an emphasis on exploration and combat. The game's name would also appear later as a text-based online adventure from Kesmai. Flinn and Taylor had seen and played Adventure and Zork, but chose to emphasize action in their title, again written during their summer vacations as college students.
• Island of Kesmai (1981) — expands on their gaming system, in this case trying to use all the power of the university's new VAX computer. They added rich text descriptions to the ASCII graphic maps and minimal combat feedback text of their prior games. The university reported—to its dismay—that the game did indeed use all the processing power of the new VAX.