Spaceward Ho!

Long ago in the early 90’s, in the summers spent at home during my undergraduate years, a group of friends and I would while away summer evenings together. Some nights we would play cards, some nights miniature golf. On some nights, however, we would gather every Macintosh we could and play Spaceward Ho! at the home of the only one of us that had struck out on his own and gotten his own place.

We heaped the Macs on a cheap kitchen table topped with bad linoleum and tangled a rat’s nest of power and AppleTalk cables in the middle. We could usually get five machines or, if we were lucky, six. Most of them were smaller Macs – tiny SEs. There was one coveted MacII with a color screen. We fussed with the cables and tested the network and made sandwiches in the kitchen until all was ready. We took our drinks to the table under a dim ceiling light of yellowing plastic, and the fog of war descended.

There was a strange electric silence at the table as we each took stock of our little corner of the galaxy. We cast our lots with range or weapons or radical technology, fiddled with spending knobs, and nervously built a colony ship and sent out scouts. Those early stages were always fun; I remember the little thrill at the start of a new game of Empire, a single star and eight dots, with a world of possibilities and an enemy out there somewhere. The single-player Ho! captures that well, but around that kitchen table it was different, more immediate. We studied our maps and cast glances at each other, imagining what the others might see.

Once we got going, the conversation began. We talked about all the usual topics, gracefully dancing around anything that might betray tactical information. We found other ways of communicating, too. Someone stacked their Sound control panel with all of the signature Ho! noises and staged mock battles and scientific discoveries for all to hear. That was devastatingly effective for one game until everyone started doing it. It became an art-form; eventually, the technique was used to tell jokes. We all got good at mimicking the aural ticks of game play with our voices. We could all say “Hurry Up!” in chorus, and our spaceward cursing was note-perfect.

As the night wore on and the galaxy tightened, some of us would surrender and step away from our machines, only to pull up a chair over the shoulder of a survivor. Sometimes, we’d take a look at multiple monitors to get the whole view of the universe, to better understand what had crushed us. Usually we’d stick with just one shoulder. Knowing too much before the game was finished ruined the magic, even for the spectators.

I’ve since played many multi-player computer games, both in single rooms and using wires to span oceans, but none have ever quite recaptured the flavor of those nights of Ho! we played in that cramped kitchen under that dim light. Some of this was the novelty. We were all used to playing machines, and the state of the art in machine opponents in those days wasn’t very good. Some of it, too, was that Spaceward Ho! is a very good game. It’s terrific fun. There was more, though.

Ho! was the first game I played that modeled a shared world in ways that Combat or Pong (or more modern examples, such as Wii Sports) do not. This is not to say that Combat or Pong or Wii Sports are not good games (they are) or terrific fun (very much so!) but they seem to get in the way. I am very aware that I am playing a game when I play those. The old Atari games don’t offer much immersion, and I can’t help but think that four people playing an rousing game of tennis while all facing the same direction seems a little silly.

Playing Ho! was not like that. We hid in the anonymity of the simple names and silly cowboy hats. We took chances. We made feints and sowed confusion. We tried to surprise each other and scrambled to survive the attacks when the strategies came back around to roost. Then, when the wreckage of the galaxy had been finally been claimed, we all sat back with our drinks and untangled what had happened. We swore and cursed each other over key battles and just how badly they had broken us. We unwound the history of the evening to discover how important each move had been in the grand scheme of the galaxy. In some ways, we had the most fun playing Ho! during the time we spent after we had coiled up the AppleTalk and put away the power strips.

In most of the multi-player gaming world, the story of the game is either a rigid narrative or inconsequential. Ho! was the first game we played that let us tell the story ourselves.

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