“The Oddly Angled Room”: A Preview of Future Excursions to the “Underground (Toy) Empire”

OK dear readers, this is primarily for my fellow Gen-X’ers, although if you’re a younger (or even older!) gamer who also has a keen interest in the history of gaming, you may get this too, even if it was way before your time. Let’s see a show of “likes..:”

Who else remembers playing ZORK???

Some of you are probably already smiling; for those of you who are too young to have been there-or who just missed the boat-Zork was an early pre-graphics computer game. Yes, pre-graphics: it was a text-only game made for “green screen” computers than ran with 5.25” removable floppy drives. Conceptually, this is the computer-age equivalent of listening to radio programs before TV was invented! It was a role-playing adventure game that required the player to solve numerous complicated mysteries and puzzles…and it was spectacular! To this day I consider it one of the best games I ever played, and I’ve realized there are a lot of folks out there around my age that feel the same.

It was my dad that introduced me to Zork in 1982 when I was no more than 11 years old; he found out about it from a co-worker who turned him onto it and made some illicit copies of the games for him in the days when doing so was as easy as copying your favorite record album to a cassette for a friend.

At the time, dad had a very expensive home computer on long-term loan from his job: it was an Otrona Attache, billed as a “portable computer” which must have weighed 30 pounds and had a built-in handle and a 5” built-in monitor, and a detachable keyboard that connected to the CPU with a cord that looked like a telephone cord with an RJ-11 connector on the end of it. This slick little machine was considered one of the finest computers of its day, and it was insanely spendy; I wasn’t allowed to touch it without his supervision. But one weekend day, dad sought me out and brought me into his home office and set me down to show me the following text:

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

What is this, I asked? He smiled and told me to open the mailbox.

Some of the happiest memories of my life-I mean that very literally-are of playing Zork with my dad for hours in his office in front of that little computer, listening to the drives whirr and click as we explored “The Underground Empire.” We worked on that game for over a year, and I’ll admit that we couldn’t solve some of those puzzles and had to buy the “Invisi-clue” books with the special marker you had to run over the pages to reveal the answers to help us with some of the most challenging puzzles; this worked by revealing a series of clues which pointed to the answer and got successively more clear as you went down the page until the very last one, which essentially told you the answer outright; the idea was that you still had a chance to solve the puzzle with hints rather than someone just telling you the answer, which took the fun out of it.

One of those puzzles that was most difficult to solve was the conundrum of “The Oddly Angled Room” from “Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz.” Neither dad nor I were big baseball fans, which would have helped solve this puzzle, but I think that even for people who were baseball fans, it would have been a challenge! The Invisi-clue book helped, but I think-if I remember right-we did get the solution to this puzzle before we had to reveal all the clues.

OK, so this is a cool little trip down memory lane, but why do I mention this on a blog about slot cars?

Well, its because the catacombs of my house where I have built the toy empire this entire blog is about has an “oddly angled room” of its own, which is called such due to one of its 4 walls being canted at a 45 degree angle in relation to all the others.

This room, which is partially finished (it has drywall but no carpeting), was built as a bedroom, as it has a full closet and a bathroom right next to it, but it has been used as a store room for as long as I’ve lived here. Inside this room are stacks of large boxes which contain, in essence, everything I’ve ever owned in my life. And at least 4 of these large boxes are packed with blister packaged Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars….hundreds upon hundreds of them!

Most of the models I’m referring too were bought between 1995 and 1999 when I lived in my first apartment in Orange, CA, but there are plenty that go back a lot farther than that, to when I was living with my family…some of them go all the way back to the ‘80s. None of these toy cars have seen the light of day since I left California in 1999 save for one time, when I went through those boxes to see what I had. I don’t even remember when that was, but I think the time is coming to go through them again! It will be quite an excavation to get to them, since there are a lot of other items that will have to be moved to access them, but I’ve gotten a promise from someone to remove some of the items stored there that are not mine, and some of the other stuff is going to have to be gotten rid of this year due to my “pack-ratting” just getting out of control: some of the things that were moved in to this room will not be moving back out.

So then, consider this post a teaser of things to come, and a fun look back on an early computer game that I’ll bet some of you remember! In the future, when I get the time to dig those boxes out, I will be showing the world what I have in them, and for the first time, dear readers, I may even offer some of them for sale; so if you’re interested in a large number of Hot Wheels “first editions” from throughout the 90’s or some Matchboxes from the ‘80’s still sealed in their original packaging, stay tuned! Of course, I’ll have to make sure I have a strong lantern when I go down there to do that digging: if I try to work in the dark, I am “likely to be eaten by a grue!” 😀