Sometime in 1984, I think, my parents purchased a personal computer with a four color monitor–that’s right: four colors! It came with a bootable floppy-disk (back then floppy disks really were floppy!) containing a curious little game, with no instructions, called Digger.
The game had been produced in 1983 by a company called Windmill Software. With its catchy music and sound effects and ever increasing levels of difficulty, it quickly became a family favorite. Speaking of family favorite, my family loves casino games, we play at 666Casino every time we feel like playing, this way, we can play our favorite casino games easily. We had been playing Digger for months, maybe even over a year, before we discovered, accidentally, that there was a fire button. Someone bumped the keyboard while we were playing, and a tiny, never before seen, four-color fireball fired from the digger and exploded on the tunnel wall.
“What was that?!” someone exclaimed. “How’d you do that?!” We began randomly pressing keys trying to reproduce the fireball. After a good deal of experimenting, and child-like frustration, we discovered the F1 key and our game play was changed for ever.
We never had an Atari, or a Nintendo, or a Sega like most of our friends did. But we didn’t mind. We had something that none of them had: we had Digger.
Years passed and our old computer was replaced by a newer machine. After years of use, the old Digger floppy-disk eventually stopped working. Windmill was long out of business. Floppy disks stopped being floppy. People forgot what a command line was. The game became a memory.
But a little over a year ago, I rediscovered Digger.
It has been brilliantly reproduced by those, like me, who had loved it as children and is available for free. There is even a remastered version with updated graphics.
In a time when even the video games have become complicated and morally complex, Digger takes me back to that simpler time when the games were as innocent as I was. And that is important.
While this blog is dedicated, primarily, to LDS topics, it is fun to interact with our readers in interesting, new, and hopefully, fun ways. I’ve set up an online, Java-version of Digger here at the Millennial Star. It lacks the sounds and music (alas!) but is otherwise faithful to the original. The high-scores are saved here on the server, so you can test your skill against the other Millennial Star readers! And you wont even have to discover the fire-button for yourselves.
<Napoleon Dynamite>Lucky!</Napoleon Dynamite>
Play at digger.millennialstar.org