Stargate Worlds :: Bios and Pics :: Bill Slease

I remember sitting in my Dad's friend's kitchen. I was ten. There was a goofy contraption he'd brought home from work that looked a little like a typewriter. If you wanted to build a typewriter that could defeat the Germans, it would probably look a lot like this thing. In addition to the keyboard (I use the term loosely) there was a goofy rubber receptacle into which my Dad's friend plugged the kitchen phone receiver. This thing, I would later learn, was called a teletype. And the number he dialed was a mainframe…somewhere.

There was a Frankensteinian moment where the kitchen lights flared, and the teletype hummed, and I watched it come alive. This is what it said to me:

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
> ?

"Type 'down,'" my Dad's friend said. So I did.
Vvvvvvvvt, the paper roll rolled. The teletype typed. And now it told me:

In A Valley
You are in a valley in a forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed.
> ?

I was hooked. I don't know what everyone else did that night, but I was glued to this story-telling robot from the future. I went home and bought a Commodore Vic-20 and learned to do amazing things with BASIC like:

10 Print "Hello"
20 Goto 10

I wrote my first game on the Vic-20. It was a top-down Spy Hunter clone called Swifty that took half an hour to load from the tape drive. It had a midi theme song that I can sing for you sometime. One Saturday morning the drive ate the tape and that, I'm afraid, was the end of that. I graduated to the Commodore 64 and wrote assembly code that cycled the screen color so fast the monitor couldn't keep up. That, my friends, was power.

Twenty-five years passed. After a brief stint as a Navy officer, a longer stint as a youth minister, an equally long stint as a programmer at the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University, and a very long stint at Cyan Worlds working on titles like Uru and Myst 5, my wife, my daughter and I find ourselves in Phoenix, Arizona of all places working on a very cool Stargate project.

I can't help feeling as if…I'm standing at the end of a road before a small brick building…

Vvvvvvvvt.