linux.conf.au: Games Linux users play

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 17 December 2007 20:31

Opinion and Analysis

Some people tend to take a fancy to something or the other after being exposed to the same at an early stage in life. In Tim 'Mithro' Ansell's case, it was exactly the reverse.
A few days short of sixteen years ago, Ansell's parents gave him a PC as a Christmas gift. Just an ex-Telecom AT with half a megabyte of memory and four megs of storage.

For an eight-year-old, obviously, games were the focus. But in 1991, the situation was the opposite of what it is today: all the cool games were available for the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. There was little or nothing for the PC.

This did not greatly discourage young Ansell. Says he: "My computer being a PC couldn't run any of these games, so I was determined (as an eight-year-old can be) to recreate them using GW-BASIC, which came with the computer, on my own. I only got as far as a few text-based games, but it started my interest both in gaming and programming."

Ansell's interest hasn't waned over the years; if anything, it has grown. Next month, he will be organising the Gaming Miniconf at Australia's national Linux conference , something he did for the 2007 conference as well.

Tracing his evolution from being an eight-year-old hacker is fascinating. His next computer was a long time coming - "(it) was actually brought for my mum to finish her Ph.D thesis) (and) was a 586 with a massive 64mb of RAM and 1 gig hard drive. The internet was really starting to take off too. It didn't have any type of programming tools, however."

His first experience of Linux was, as for many others, with Red Hat. He heard that Linux would give him the ability to actually write programs. "I ended up installing this thing called Red Hat 5.1 on my computer in a 'massive' 300mb partition."

Precocious? That seems like an understatement. When he started high school, his year eight mathematics teacher told him that there was nothing she could teach him that year. She knew that he was interested in computers and gave him permission to help the school network administrator while mathematics was taught in the classroom.

Ansell says that during this time he became interested in "these things called 'MUSHes'- which were online text-based communities. Having access to the school's server, I was able to set up a MUSH game which my friends and I could play on. The MUSH was scriptable and we developed various things like a simple combat system or little bots."