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Tommy's Christmas Repton
December 25, 2003 |
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A Christmas eighteen years ago
Christmas Eve in Germany is a very special family festival.
Children invariably visit their parents – until they
have children of their own. Dinner is prepared, a tree
decorated, the TV set is left silent. And there are very
few phone calls.
Yesterday there was one, and a very welcome one at that.
"Happy Christmas Eve," said the gruff voice at
the other end of the line. "So, how long ago was it?
Seventeen or eighteen years?" Eighteen, Garry, Christmas
Eve 1985. We all remember it fondly. You can find a description
in the early autobiography, Garry Kasparov: Child of
Change, Hutchinson 1987 (pp. 220-221):
In 1985 Frederic Friedel took me to meet his wife
Ingrid and his sons Martin and Thomas. It was the 24th
of December and I hadn't realised that everything in
the country would close down for the Christmas holiday,
so they asked me to stay with them. It was my first experience
of a Western Christmas, of the tree lit by candles and
all the presents arranged neatly around it. According
to German custom, the lights go out and the tree is lit.
Then a bell rings and everyone exchanges presents, followed
by Christmas dinner.
Late that night we started playing computer games.
The children were phenomenal at these games, especially
Thomas, who was only three years old at the time. We
played Repton, a sophisticated game that John Nunn, himself
a mathematics teacher, had spent many hours trying to
solve...
Yes, that was an unusual Christmas. A youthful Nigel Short,
who tended to pop in at any time and stay for weeks on
end, was at our home in Hollenstedt, North Germany. Garry
Kasparov came to Hamburg to play a clock simultaneous against
the HSK Bundesliga team, and when he discovered what this
Christmas Eve thing was, he agreed to spend it with us.
Christmas, the children's festival – here Martin
Friedel, 10, enjoying the gifts
A little Christmas present for our Russian guest
Late at night, time for computer games. Martin shows
Garry the good stuff
Garry tries his hand while his main chess rival Nigel
Short looks on
Frederic Friedel gets to play, while Garry holds young
Tommy on his knee
Repton
There are many tales to be told about Repton, a game which
was released in the summer of 1985 for the BBC microcomputer.
Repton became the second most successful game (after the
space adventure Elite) at the time. More details on this
ground-breaking program will be provided in the course
of the week.
Repton was brought into our house by (you'll never guess)
John Nunn late in 1985. At the time I was being seriously
pestered by Tommy, who wanted to join in the fun we were
obviously having with the computer. Tommy was not yet three,
and I started writing a program to teach him how to move
an object (a little rocket) on the screen using the keyboard.
The goal was to move the rocket directly below a planet
and then hit Enter to fire it.
Tommy having loads of fun with his father's brilliant
rocket program
The rocket program provided Tommy with minutes and minutes
of fun. It soon became obvious that it was too simple for
the child, and so I got to work on a more complex version,
with the planet moving around. In the meantime ten-year-old
Martin loaded Repton, put Tommy's fingers on the keys and
his own on top of them. In this configuration he played
the game. After a while he removed his hands, and Tommy
was playing it on his own. The process took about an hour.
As the weeks went by we could only watch in amazement.
This child, who could not tie his shoelaces, was solving
level after level of a highly complex maze game, with a
speed that exceeded anything grownups could ever hope to
achieve. Tommy even learnt to read and type, after he discovered
the principle of passwords, which were required to start
new levels ("So that's what reading is for!").
At the time we all thought that we had some kind of all-time
freak genius in the house, but soon discovered that most
childeren were able to do the same at a similar age.
By the time Garry came over for Christmas, Tommy had just
turned three. To Garry's abject horror he was clearly better
at any computer game than the newly crowned World Chess
Champion. So deep was Garry impressed by this experience
that, when the computer manufacturer Atari made a promotion
deal with him, he did not take money but instead over a
hundred home computers, which he donated to youth clubs
in Russia. It was clear to him that the main threat from
the West came not from Pershing missiles but from a generation
of wizz kids who were growing up with the new computer
technology that would soon dominate our lives.
Recreating the game
Eighteen years have passed, Garry Kasparov and John Nunn
now have young sons of their own, equipped with computers
and state-of-the-art games. Thomas Friedel is now 21 and
a high-powered C++ programmer. He decided it would be interesting
to recreate the game that had started him on computers,
and give it to the sons of the people who had played it
with him back in the eighties.
It took Tommy about two weeks of work to write a very
authentic version of the BBC game for the Windows platform,
one that gives you an accurate feel for what computer games
were like when he was a child. Incidentally most of the
debugging was done by John Nunn's five-year-old son Michael.
Repton for you
Tommy's Christmas Repton was created with the permission
and support of Superior
Software, who originally published Repton for the BBC
and still own the rights to it. We will tell you more about
this company and its products during the coming days. The
director of Superior, Richard, has kindly allowed us to
distribute Tommy's clone to the visitors of our web site.
You can download the program by clicking the link given
below.
This is the game as it starts – in the original
BBC resolution. At the time you had to construct a picture
of the entire maze in your mind, only assisted by a primitive
map. In Tommy's version you can resize the window and zoom
the graphics (Options – Zoom), so that the entire
level fits on your screen.
Repton resembles the game Boulderdash, which some of you
may know, but it was created quite independently (the original
author Tim Tyler never saw Boulderdash) and is, in our
opinion, far superior. The game is easy to play –
even a child will understand it in a few minutes. The object
is to collect all the diamonds in the underground maze,
while looking out for rocks. You only need the four cursor
keys to move the Repton and solve the game.
When you download the program you will get a file which
you should unzip into any directory of your computer. No
installation is required, simply start the file called
repton.exe. The program only runs smoothly on
modern graphics cards. If you have a very old version you
may need to keep the window very small to play the game
properly.
Tommy's Christmas Repton initially contains only one level,
a fairly easy one to get you started. Once you have solved
it you will be given a password for the next level, which
will be posted here tomorrow. A total of eight levels,
which become progressively harder, will become available
over the next eight days.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a lot of fun with the
Repton game. Don't get addicted. In tomorrow's installment
of our Christmas Puzzles we will return to chess, the game
we are really interested in.
Frederic Friedel
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