Get My Drift
Digital Snow
By Ian Hughes / epredator
In certain parts of the world indigenous people have hundreds of words for snow. Those of us in rather less snowy climates tend to view snow as something magical or something we head to on a relatively expensive activity holiday. Snow is a complicated and fascinating part of life on this planet, it’s a change in state of an essential element that keeps us alive. Therefore it makes sense that when we can’t be somewhere snowy we like to play and experience it and its activities anyway.
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As a teenager I had a saturday job as a shop assistant in W.H. Smith. It was when we had the initial influential wave of home computers with the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 (ask you Dad). You may just view W.H. Smith as a newsagent or stationary shop but at the time it also sold typewriters, records and cassette tapes. These new fangled computer thingys had keyboards, so fitted with the displays of typewriters and they needed software that came on tapes. Being a fledgling techie I ended up being the one wheeled in if a customer needed to hear some geek speak. Nothing new there then! One of the popular games at the time (1982) was Hungry Horace Goes Skiing (left),
this was a follow up to Hungry Horace, a Pac Man style maze game. The key part of this Horace (who was a large blue blob on legs) game was slalom skiing. Now, the machines were very low power by todays standards and game design was still in its infancy. The entire screen was white with snow and a few obstacles and gates. Horace sat mid-screen and the gates scrolled upwards towards him simulating a slope. Pressing the rubber keys you turned Horace and he traversed left and right across the screen through a series of gates. It had that slightly out of control feel of coming down a mountain but the swoosh and swish of the skis was mostly imagined by the player. It wasn’t just skiing. There was a level