All contents © 2005
Jim Cameron
Idea's & Origins
The original idea's for
VRAI come from my love of games rules etc., and my memories
of playing on computers and arcade games for hours (occassionally days!) on
end in the
80's. Mixed with the movies of the time like 'TRON' and 'Wargames' are memories
of the likes of
3D Monster Maze on the ZX81, Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum, Planetoids on
the BBC 'B',
High Noon, on the C64, all those great wee machines before everything got
so standardized,
when systems were totally uncompatible. Machines like, the Dragon 32, Lynx,
TI 99/4a, Apple IIe,
(. . . bear with me, I'm well up!) the Atari 400 / 800 series, Atari ST /
520, or the likes of the machine I
tried to learn machine code on, the TRS 80.
Let's not forget the old Binatone, 'Pong' you got free with TV's, or the original
Atari XXX with it's
wooden box (mine broke - I took the top off it and actually managed to fix
it - went to school leaving
the top off and came back to find my dad had thrown it out and was furious
that I'd, 'broken it'!), the
Intellivision by Mattel, a bloody great machine, and all those ones most of
us never got to see, like
the Colecovision etc. Anyway, I digress . . .
The concepts of some
of these games were great, if the games themselves didn't always live up to
the hype, but many did, especially in the arcade's, to this day I think Eugene
Evans is a god! He was
the guy who wrote the likes of 'Defender', and 'Bezerk', and, along with other
classics such as,
'Missile Command', and 'Asteroids' ensured I was perpetually skint!
These all merged in my
thinking when it came to VRAI, concepts such as 'Transfer Lag' for instance,.
that
is used in many of the stories as background detail come from the way the
audio tapes always carried a signal
before and after the actual program, or things like the way much of the defence
systems work during the
transfers reflects the way the screenshots while loading would be built (the
weapons systems
within these are based on Quantum Theory observations, mind).
Similarly, the various
environment generators are based on some of the early level builders
you'd get, which although the graphics have drastically improved over the
years, haven't really
changed much over the years otherwise.
Of course, more recently
I've been reading a lot about how the various companies
grew to what they are today (or crashed - the market imploded in the late
80's thanks to the
poor quality of a lot of third party software). As well as the transformations
that others have had
to make, whether through market forces, or politics etc. (IBM for instance,
didn't buy Miicrosofts
BASIC from them due to having been burned doing so with another company before
hand. This gave
'Bill & Allen' the ability to sell it on to clone makers (again, not hard
- in order for the IBM group that
brought out their PC to do so in a year and a half (lightening speed for a
company that's exec's had
turned inward, and being on top meant who had the best OP presentations at
meetings), they had to
'buy off the shelf' parts).
Having been forced to
split into 'Baby Blues' etc. by the US govt., they've gone back to their
roots as a company, specialising in R&D.
This was great stuff
as background to the world outside VRAI, but more recently, having read
quite a bit on such things as the fast food industry, and the working practices
behind the huge
supermarket chains, and their treatment of suppliers, and approach to profit
without much thought
for the health of the consumer (how often do you see a BOGOF offer on fruit
or veg, it's always
on crisps and chocolate, and fizzy drinks etc.). So much so, actually, that
I make an active effort
to buy from local shops (!)
Anyway, if you've got
through the above, it should give you an idea of the sort
of mentality I tend to adopt when writing VRAI stories etc.