It Was February of 1996...

... and I was sitting in my college dorm room during a winter storm playing The Lurking Horror for the very first time instead of doing my homework. Given the game puts you in the shoes of a college student on campus during a winter storm who winds up doing basically everything except working on their term paper, I don't think there's a more perfect way to experience it. Or if there is, I certainly haven't come up with it.

Trying to explain to a modern-day gamer how you could get the creeps simply playing a text adventure cannot be easy. I imagine it's akin to my grandfather telling me about how scary he found a particular episode of the radio program "I Love A Mystery" back in the 1940s. I'm part of a generation that grew up never knowing what it was like to not have a TV in the house; the idea of family gathering around the radio in the evening for entertainment seemed strange -- radio was what you listened to in the car, or in the morning so you could hear the weather while getting ready for school.

Nevertheless, that's where I was: sitting in my third-floor dorm room, snow blowing around just outside my window, in front of a Toshiba laptop running Windows 95 on a 75mhz Pentium with 8 megabytes of memory, and The Lurking Horror taking up a few kilobytes of space on my 504-megabyte hard drive. Had I needed to print out my own report, I'd have had to walk across campus to the all-night computer lab. The only way it could have felt more authentic is if I'd actually been playing the game at MIT as opposed to my Midwestern public college.

I've never quite connected with a game the way I connected with The Lurking Horror that evening. It felt real, even though it was just words on a screen, and I wasn't in any real danger. But it was visceral. Weird. Fun in way that felt like Halloween had returned for a surprise encore. And I loved it.

I didn't beat The Lurking Horror that night. But I had one of the best, most engaging experiences of my life playing it with the lights out, the snow falling, and the knowledge that I was as close to the game's setting as I could possibly get. I hadn't planned it that way, it was one of those things that unfolded organically, where everything necessary for things to come together in just the right way lined up perfectly.

For gamers used to the terrifying, fully-3D worlds of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it's probably impossible to explain why this was so incredible. But if you're of a certain age, if you remember a world before always-online broadband internet was the standard, then you remember what it felt like. I wouldn't trade that memory for anything. Chances are, you wouldn't either.