I look back on the things that influenced me and my thinking about Dungeons and Dragons when I was 8 or 10 and a few highlights stand out strongly.
There are the usuals: Transformers, Thundercats, He-Man, various live action TV shows... I wonder if the A-Team is a huge influence on the way I play D&D? I bet it is and does, and I wonder if other people have made that particular connection. I don't even remember much about the show, other than the various team-work and "make some deadly gizmo" montage stuff. BA Barracus and his poison cat milk, Mad Mog Murdock, Faceman, Hannibal Lecter, that Robot V.I.C.K.I. that we all know and love. The hideous panther cultists that imbued the doctor guy with the power of the jungle cats. A 30 story battle gundam that shoots lasers out of its mouth. Man, the A-Team was the best. Don't try to mess up my A-Team headcannon with your feeble takes on reality: my version is better and will remain so in the face of contradictory evidence. The earth is flat, CORONA is a hoax, the aliens are prepping us for invasion, and my own subjective memory of the 80's has little bearing on Reaganism, Thatcherism, and where we are now.
Case in point: Atari's "Adventure" for the 2600 system. In my view the 2600 is the most important of all gaming systems and at the root of the present day mass-dissociation from reality of which I am a merely minor player. Why? It was ubiquitous and easy-to-grasp, not like the infuriating personal computers of the day that required "patience" and "understanding". Slap that cartridge in, flip the switch, and Let's GOOOOOOO. Remind me one day to talk about my experience programming adventure games in BASIC on the C64 - later. Right now, we're talking about "Adventure".
Warren Robinette's opus was not only a tour-d-force of programming economy and subversive swindling of the managers-in-charge, it's also clever and beautiful and elegant and infinitely replayable! If you're naive, he pretty much invented not just visual CRPGs but also the Easter Egg as we know it. BUT! BUT! The manual for the cartridge ("what's a cartridge? today's kids will ask") - even though it seems to me not even written by Robinette, it contains the structure of a pure, distilled fairy tale and perfect and complete premise for every adventure before-and-ever-after. Stolen from Arthurian legend, somehow better and more perfect and precise. The box art painting by Susan Jakael quite simply merges with the actual game to become something that is, in my 7 or 8 year old brain, better than any drug or movie or cartoon until I was introduced shortly thereafter to D&D by my teenage half-brother and some gawky older kids... (gary and brian, you weirdos, thanks for nothing!)
In the box art, foreground we can see a few people/players/elves(?) trapped in the hedge maze, where a coiling wyrm holds aloft a yellow key. Beneath the wyrm, the crown and a hand that reaches for it... In the distance, a few other elves march off on pilgrimage from the Golden Castle. The Golden Castle is a Camelot, a Magic Place, the Ur-Castle. Banners flying, portcullis, you know the drill. And that's about it. A tree, dead. The tree looms large in my young mind... Why is the tree blighted but the hedge-maze green and robust? Well, the tree is natural of course and the hedge-maze is MAGIC, of course. The manual names some dragons, tells us that the sword is a part of the Good Magic, that the Dragons are Bad Magic (the Bat, too). The Magnet is hand-waved in the manual, and the Bridge (perversion of 2D reality!) is not even mentioned. The manual takes great pains to explain away a hardware problem implicit in the game, namely that the more sprites there are on the screen, the less likely they are to work properly and this can even be used (for example) to get past the dead body of a dragon that might block your way... I can dimly recall the feeling of wonder and perplexity when I first encountered this game, and the sheer awful terror of a struggling dot swallowed into the belly of a roaring beast. Trapped Jonah-like, as my Lutheran school brain clearly connected. Hit the button and he's/you're/it's regurgitated and you try again.
More later
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