No one left to ask

When I was 12, I was obsessed with computers. My father sold IBM PCs for a living, so we did not have one PC at home. We had two.

Unheard of in the early nineties. The neighborhood kids loved me for it.

I played Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest on those machines. Sadly, all the cool games lived in the Amiga scene, and I had no access to it. The Amiga kids had Turrican. I had a text parser telling me "You can't do that here." So I had to make do with the little that existed for the PC.

Until a friend showed me QuickBasic. He had written several games in it himself. Side-scrollers and top-down shooters, all in glorious ASCII graphics. He showed me a few examples, and the rest I had to teach myself from books. Thick ones. Because very soon there was nobody left I could ask.

An uncomfortable, threatening feeling.

I built my own games anyway. Quiz games. Tron clones. Nothing that would have made it onto an Amiga kid's floppy disk, but they were mine.

Same story a few years later with the levels I built for Duke Nukem 3D, which came out in 1996. I remember printing out the complete 150-page documentation of Ken Silverman's Build engine on a needle printer of my parents and devouring it during a three-week beach holiday with my parents in Portugal. There is nothing else to do on a beach when you are 15 anyway. I built levels in my head on the beach and later on my PC at home. Some of them made it onto the cover CDs of computer magazines, which made me ridiculously proud. Yes, CDs. Ask your parents.

And with the Build engine, too, there was soon nobody left to ask. Again that uncomfortable, threatening feeling.

My parents died not long after. And now there was nobody left to ask about all the other things in life either. Suddenly I was completely alone. Apart from the tragedy of losing both parents, that feeling has stayed with me to this day. The same one. Uncomfortable. Threatening.

The internet and its endless possibilities made it a little better. A little.

Today I had to hook up a maintenance charger to a battery for winter storage. Lots of questions. AGM or GEL? Which of the seven modes? Why is it blinking at me like that? Normally this is exactly the kind of moment where the feeling shows up. But for the first time, I noticed it was gone. Completely. I could simply rely on AI to give me the right answers. I even showed it photos of the charger and the battery, and it told me what to do. No "You can't do that here."

A great feeling. The world has become infinitely less threatening for me.

PS: It still can't tell me where the Amiga kids got Turrican from.