Slashdot Mirror

It was Pyramid 2000.

• John Fledgling
• John Ya Ya
• John Parrot
• John Bigboote (BIG-BOO-TAY! TAY! TAY!)
• John Nolan
• John O'Connor
• John Mud Head
• John Smallberries
• John Many Jars
• John Littlejohn
• John Starbird
• John Lee
• John Whorfin
• etc.

I'm now in the latter half of my thirties and my girlfriend is in her mid-twenties and I was just rambling on about text adventure games. She looked at me like I had three heads and never heard of such a thing.

I distinctly remember a trip to a business with computers (and data stored on punch cards) when I was 10-ish and seeing the opening lines from Zork

A year or two later we bought a TRS-80 Colour Computer (with Extended Basic!) and I learnt to type by spending days and days and days with Pyramid 2000, Madness and the Minotaur, Raaka-Tu, Bedlam ... and went on to enjoy those early "graphical" adventures like the Dallas Quest. I didn't actually play Zork until much, much later.

It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.

Here's a link to my favourite, Pyramid 2000: http://www.figmentfly.com/pyramid2000/pyramid.html

Graphics aren't everything, as I'm sure many people here can attest to.

I would attest to that, but it appears I've been eaten by a grue.

Heck, just for nostalgia I occasionally whip out the ol' Trash-80 emulator and play Raaka-Tu every so often, or Bedlam...

Ditto for the DOS games. When a game is still enjoyable 20 years later, THAT, my friends, is value.

Graphics aren't everything, as I'm sure many people here can attest to.

I would attest to that, but it appears I've been eaten by a grue.

Heck, just for nostalgia I occasionally whip out the ol' Trash-80 emulator and play Raaka-Tu every so often, or Bedlam...

Ditto for the DOS games. When a game is still enjoyable 20 years later, THAT, my friends, is value.

Why was the watermelon there? Where is the sequel? Was Jamie Lee Curtis in the film? Was Big Trouble In Little China originally written as sequel for Buckaroo Banzai? All these questions and more are covered in the Buckaroo Banzai FAQ located at http://www.figmentfly.com/bb/bbindex.shtml. Sean

Haven't you seen Buckaroo Banzai?

Actually, it's a modified F-350 with a GE jet turbine.

More information

As cool as the DMC-based Time Machine is (and I have to admit, the original B-T-T-F movie is a good memory of my teenage years), the whole BB stuff just rocked. Soooo much more wacked, and so much more fun.

Now, if I can just get Kaneda's Bike from Akira...

-Erik

I guess you weren't alive back in the days of the Tandy TRS-80 Model ]I[. I vividly remember riding along with my dad to the Tandy Computer store and staring at the rows upon rows of brown 3-ring binders. They were all identical looking except for the name of the software, which was printed on the cover. Inside the binder would be some floppy discs (and they really were floppy back then!) and maybe a manual.

I remember when he bought me an adventure game called Xenos. It came in a 3-ring binder, too, although it had a fancy 4-color insert. I can remember how stoked I was when we brought it home. It's a shame that you have to spend thousands on box design to sell a great game nowdays.

As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.

And a few other people, both before and after the movie.

Sigh. Kids these days. You assumed incorrectly. It was a reference to the science-fiction cult classic film Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension." It was a movie made in 1984, starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, and Clancy Brown. A television series based on the movie has been in development Hell for the past few years. Who knows if it'll actually see daylight. But the original movie remains a classic, and some semi-famous quotes, including "No matter where you go, there you are," came from the film.

Instead of naming a security scheme after Plan 9 From Outer Space, Why not name it after Buckaroo Banzai?