Very early digital development

I likely this because it is an example of how innovation sometimes comes from unlikely people. The wife, in particular, does not initially seem like the type to revolutionize part of the computer industry.

The story concept was certainly innovative, but it wasn’t the sort of innovation that would immediately appeal to a guy like Ken, with little interest in game design in the abstract. He was rather interested in products he could sell, operating intuitively by a rule he would later, for better and perhaps sometimes for worse, codify and articulate regularly: “Games have to have ‘WOW-value.’ If you don’t say ‘wow’ when someone describes the game to you, or you see it from 10 feet away, there’s no reason to market the game.” At first, caught up in his FORTRAN software and his prior experience of computers only as serious tools of business, he was dismissive of Roberta’s little project. But as she persisted, and as he perhaps began to notice that companies like Adventure International were growing rapidly and making real money just like the “serious” software houses, he began to reconsider. Still, he needed something special, needed an angle to help their little game stand out from the likes of the established line of Scott Adams games.

He began to think about the Apple II, with its comparatively cavernous 48 K of RAM, its fast and reliable disk drives, and its bitmap graphics capability. What if he designed their game around the unique capabilities of that machine, instead of taking the portable lowest-common-denominator approach of Adams? And then came the brainstorm: he could use the Apple’s hi-res mode to include pictures with the text. That would certainly make their game stand out. Pretty soon FORTRAN was forgotten, and work on Mystery House (the first of a whole line of On-Line Systems “Hi-Res Adventures”) had begun in earnest. The husband-and-wife team were not that far removed from Woz and Jobs. Here, Roberta designed the thing out of her inherit fascination with the thing itself, while Ken enabled her efforts, providing the tools and support she needed to bring her vision to life and, soon enough, finding ways to sell that vision to the masses.