resurrecting dead code from Night City
The Olden Days
In late 1991, I was a graduate student with a few hobbies. One was being the Game Master of a role playing game called Cyberpunk 2020 for some friends and acquaintances. To make running a game easier, I wrote a program in the C language, which I had just learned the basics of in grad school. This program would generate dozens or even hundreds of non-player characters (NPCs) to represent random strangers that the main characters would encounter in their day to day life in the dystopian future. And I posted this program online somewhere. I don’t really know where, because at the time almost nobody in the world knew about the World Wide Web; it had only existed one year and nobody expected it to really catch on. Keep in mind, this was three years before Eternal September.
Later
Fast forward 30+ years. Life happened. I ended up becoming a professional software engineer, and I totally forgot about this computer program. Then I got an email this week out of the blue. It was from person who found me through some web searches, and wanted to know if I was the same Todd Bradley as the person who wrote this little program in the early 90s. After a little back-and-forth, the internet stranger said they used this program of mine for years, and actually kept a copy this whole time. Even more, they’re teaching their teenager how to play the modern version of this same game. I’m happy to hear they’re passing it on to the next generation, and even happier to “meet” a user of my software after all these years.
Also, a decade later it was clear this World Wide Web thing had some potential, and so I created a site of my own. The one you’re visiting is the modern version of that site from 2001. So now I can stash this program online once again. I’ll put it in the Downloads Archive. I haven’t written anything in C since around 1996, I think, but I’m a lot better programmer now than I was in the early 90s. I can tell just by looking at how primitive the code is for this. I’m embarrassed to look at it now. Looking at this old app feels like reading a poem in a foreign language and knowing it’s a bad poem even though you don’t speak the language.
Side Note
About this same time I wrote and published an adventure called “Live to Tell” using Microsoft Works. And then I shared that with the world, too. In 2011, someone also contacted me out of the blue with this old adventure. To read more about that go here
And now there’s something even more mysterious. According to the text file I shared with the NPC generator, I also wrote a thing called CPFF, the Cyberpunk 2020 Fast Fortress generator. It was in Quickbasic. Apparently I shared that, too. I couldn’t even remember what Quickbasic was. I don’t remember knowing that language. But of course Wikipedia jogged my memory. See here. I wonder if anyone still has a copy of CPFF.