ABSTRACT
The flagship title in lab’s modest library of games was Star Trek, an adventure that consisted purely of text output. Toy’s love of computers and games reached new heights when he enrolled in college in the late 1970s. In 1973, computer engineers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie attended Symposium on Operating System Principles at Purdue University. To create levels that turned out differently every time they played, Toy and Wichman devised algorithms that assembled environments according to numbers chosen at random. Writing algorithms that generated clean levels was process that took months to refine. Toy dreamed of creating monsters that came across as living, breathing entities able to adjust their behavior according to how players chose to confront them. Toy and Wichman failed to notice their transcendence from lowly students to local celebrities when Rogue began circulating around UC Santa Cruz. Toy and Wichman did their best to circumvent save scumming by structuring files in ways known only to them.
