It all began in Persia…

The wondrous gray box made its way into my family’s 6th story apartment on Usilova Street by way of corruption, bribery, and contraband. Yes, the 286sx-based PC sitting in my parents’ living room felt very much like a highly illegal – and very expensive – doodad to possess in those rainy days of Soviet Spring in the city of Nizhniy Novgorod, USSR.

To this day, I am still not sure why it felt like Igor, a friend of my parents, was in danger of doing hard time in the Gulag for exposing obedient communist drones to the wonders of computing technology – or, for that matter, why he decided to bring the computer to our place for several days. Probably to lay low from the KGB for a while. For that matter, I was sure I was complicit in his crimes – after all, wasn’t it me who learned to type my first DOS commands while impressing all my friends with the only non-Soviet-piece-of-crap computer for miles around?

Insert "World's Greatest Marching Bands" Into Drive Ж:

Speaking of Soviet crap. Have you ever heard of a Mikrosha? This legandary computing powerhouse was Russia’s answer to the PC. Let me describe it for you. Imagine an integrated processing unit stuffed into a black-and-pastel keyboard, connected to a television screen… and a cassette player. Yes, a cassette player. Ernst Blofeld had a Mikrosha too! All REAL geniuses did in those days. It is no surprise that the puny Englishman James Bond got his ass handed to him so soundly in the end. Uh uh! Yep! He sure did!

Getting the Mikrosha all hooked up is fairly easy – now the fun part begins. You see, the Soviets realized from a very early stage that any form of persistent storage – whether hard or floppy (Viagra notwithstanding) – was for Westernized pussies. This means that in order to play a rousing game of Soviet Pong (or just “Понг”), you had to insert the audio cassette containing the program’s code into the cassette player… and PLAY IT AT MAXIMUM EAR-SPLITTING VOLUME!!! Yes, it had to be at max volume or it didn’t work – the genius behind the Mikrosha was too great for mere mortals like myself to understand, so don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was necessary for me to hear and appreciate the shrill yet musical harmonies that spewed forth from the little speaker (reminiscent somewhat of that old 56kbps modem dial-in sound… ONLY MUCH, MUCH LOUDER!!!), in order to understand that I was dealing with a superior product of Soviet engineering. Each program took only about 15 minutes to load this way, as is proper and polite. No need to rush art.

So you can understandably see why I was sorely devastated when my parents decided to return my Mikrosha back to the store for a refund, just 2 days after buying it for my 7th birthday. I was a broken shell of my former self – deprived of purpose and direction, I went to school, did my homework, ate, slept, gone to the bathroom (not necessarily in that order) – but there was no more joy in the world. And now, a year later, with the wounds on my heart having yet to heal, a new love comes on the scene – and boy, was it HOT. I mean, there was STRIP POKER, in lovely 16-color EGA graphics! Not that I knew how to play Poker. Then there was a game simply called “Spy” where you had escape from the bad guys via hang-glider, automobile, and other spy-centric means. But I was not much of a gamer in those days – what’s a gamer?! – so the bad guys consistently wiped the floor with me.

No Bones About It - This Game Builds Character!

Which I guess is the reason I became fixated on the one game I could actually get ahead in. Prince of Persia. Yes, I had good taste in those days – I still love the damn thing, even today, loading it up via DOSBox now and then to relive the painful memories of spike traps, falling deaths, and those chomping metal things, the very SOUND of which, in the distance, scared the bejesus out of my 8-year-old self and my school buddies, who came over to my house to bask in the sheer awesomeness that was classic DOS gaming. Our parents even allowed us to stay home from school to enjoy the computer – yes, it was that awesome!

And so we plodded along, taking turns trying to navigate the trap-filled corridors of horror that game is famous for – I believe I got as far as level 4. And then the unthinkable happened. The Prince had to go away for a while. A LONG while. Like, forever. The PC was being taken away – Igor, my parents’ friend, was back, and he needed to take his illegal stash to another safehouse, probably another of his friends’ house. That’s just how Igor operates. Slick and discrete… never staying in one place too long. But for me, it was a blow. It was like losing a loyal 4-bit hound to the dog pound. And I cried – I really cried, for a computer. It was then when my 8-year-old self realized that he needed it – that I needed the good stuff. I needed computers in my life.

Today, after dozens of PCs built from scratch, plenty of company websites designed and re-designed, countless hours of ticking away at code, and a Computer Science degree under my belt, I am still not changing my mind – at 8 years old I was as right about this as I’ll ever be – Prince of Persia was one hell of  game.

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