[intro music] It feels like the Sims has been with us for
an eternity, but it was only released in Februrary 2000. Created by Will Wright it followed games like
Sim City and Sim Ant, but it was actually inspired by a game released some 15 years
prior, by Activision, called Little Computer People. So let's explore this game and see how and
why it inspired the Sims. Human Like Beings Actually Found Living Inside
Computers. Now there's a headline to grab your attention,
and that' exactly how this game was packaged to appear; like a magazine, with a headline. In fact there's no mention of the actual title
"Little Computer People" anywhere on the front, just the magazine name of "Modern Computer
People". On the back, the fakezine aesthetic continues
with a headline and columns of text, describing the contents in a brochure like manner. In fact, this entire pack is a magazine dreamt
up by Activision's marketing department to push Little Computer People as a revolutionary
scientific experiment, which we can be part of using our humble Commodore 64. It's clear this is no ordinary gaming experience,
but then this was Activision, and new experiences was their mantra. It's easy to write that off as marketing speel,
but it's not far from the truth. Many of Activision's titles were focused on
that all important gameplay, including titles such as Pitfall for the Atari VCS and Decathlon
for the Commodore 64, both developed by David Crane. So it's here in 1985, that you might expect
David Crane's new creation to be full of gameplay as well, but as we'll find out, it's perhaps
not. The concept of Little Computer People was
conceived by a fine musician & artist named Rich Gold, who offered it up to Activision,
where it was then handed to Crane under the original name of "Pet Person", based on the
"Pet Rock" craze from the 1960s. The original plan was to create a virtual
aquarium type experience, but the lack of interaction offered by such an idea instead
opened up something perhaps a little more interesting. The Commodore 64 version released in 1985
was the first platform to be developed, and in fact, the only platform to receive this
research discovery pack. "Just a few days ago, I met face-to-face for
the first time with a remarkable research team - a group of highly specialised engineers
and software designers. I met face-to-face with their astounding research. I met face-to-face with their absolutely amazing
discovery. I met the Little Computer People. This special edition is a result of our investigation
into that incredible discovery." This introduction is by Dick Neosho, the publisher
of this fine publication, peering into this amazing scientific breakthrough. Reprinted from the renowned "Modern Computer
Anthropology" research paper. The first pages gives us a break down of what's
in store, and then we get straight into the details. "Well How do you do?" Here we see a photo of Sam Nelson and David
Crane of Activison, along with text explaining how furious the duo, along Rich Gold had become
with computer hiccups and glitches. The focus is on the glitches which couldn't
be explained, and obviously the explanation for that, is our friends, The Little Computer
People; 1977: During a lazy August in California,
two men hand assemble a prototype of the first home computer (10 points if you can name them)
1980: A cold winter night and David Crane ponders a pesky glitch over a mug of beer. Perfect code was going in, but mumbo jumbo
was coming out. 1984: Artist Rich Gold finds himself off key. Every D Flat entered on his computer returns
as a D Sharp. Gold enlists the help of engineering firm,
James Wickstead Associates. Malcolm Kaufman, gets involved and refers
the case onto Activision's Research Group - incidentally, James Wickstead Associates
are a design company and Malcolm Kaufman is a gentleman who has been involved in the world
of Video Games with various companies. 1985: Forces are joined and David Crane spearheads
the research team. Soon after the very first Little Computer
Person is spotted. A fully functional 2 1/2 story house is programmed
onto a disk and the Little Computer Person moves in! Because that's the premise here. These Little Computer People are already living
in each of our Commodore 64's, Apple II's or even Spectrums. Over the page we have various members of the
public imagining who might be living inside their machines. Some are confused, whilst others, more definite,
like this chap, V. David Watkins - A BMW Dealer from Dallas, Texas.... "All depends on the machine. IBM or Apple most probably would house someone
real tasteful, distinguished even. On the other hand, lower-priced economy brands
would likely harbor mundane individuals prone to constant memory loss. It's truly a classic melting pot. I love being an American!" We then move onto Darwin's Origins of species
and how it relates to our new electronic friends, before getting a full blown centrefold of
the amazing house on a disk. You know, I really appreciate this magazine,
I would have studied it for hours had I owned this in the 80s, and it really helps to cunjour
this story, to fire your imagination about these new tiny people. The final page has an interview with David
Crane, along with upcoming features in subsequent magazines. At the back we have a pocket, featuring the
game on floppy disk. A deed of ownership, and two instruction manuals,
one in French, and one in English. The manual includes basic operations, along
with a section at the back to fill in the details of your LCP. So I guess we'd better set this up and coax
the little blighter out. First up, we need to enter our name. We're posing as a researcher, monitoring what
this LCP does, as part of the greater project. We then need to enter the date and the current
time. The C64's real time clock will then take care
of the rest. Now at this point, this information is saved
to disk and our Little Computer Person is activated. This only happens once, so if you don't want
to seal your fate then best make a copy of the disk. Although after experiencing what happens next,
you might want to give it a miss. For here is the grand moving in ceremony. [ceremonial music] This is where your LCP comes out of the computer
circuitry and discovers this wondrous house, loaded up for him to move into (and yes, it's
always a he for whatever reason). After a few minutes, your little character
appears, he then takes about 10 minutes to explore the property, where you can't do a
damn thing. As a child, in the 80s, I might be beginning
to get cheesed off at this point, but I'm sure my fascination would have still been
the dominant sensation. Now, here's the clever thing. Each LCP is actually unique, and although
we're led to believe they've been living here for years, it's all driven off a serial number
encoded onto the disk. For the initial run of games, each disk was
sequentially numbered, with each digit, or group of digits responsible for deciding hair
colour, clothing, character type, facial expressions and even the name, which was plucked from
a list of over 250. Although due to an error, the names Patrick,
Peter, Joseph and Justin appear on this list twice, meaning this are likely the most common
LCP names. My character looks like this, but he could
quite easily look like this, or any other number of configurations. However, I'm stuck with this guy, and he seems
jolly enough, even though he's still bloody looking around the house and I can't do ANYTHING. [tapping of feet] I've been here for about 10 minutes, watching him fumble from room to room *door slams* So my chap has left the house. I presume he's gone to buy a dog and I can only presume that this game pans out.... oh wait, he's back. Let's see what he's up to.. [entrance sounds] Hoo-f*cking-ray, this is where the game begins. A dog appears in the house, and we can finally
interact with.... Bobby. His name is Bobby. So let's find out more about Bobby, shall
we? [friendly neighbourhood music] *cupboard shuts* Bobby. There he is, happily washing up, not a care
in the world. I think he's preparing some food, maybe for
himself, maybe for his jolly little dog. Who can possibly tell. In a few minutes he'll probably do something
else. He'll go somewhere else. His dog will go somewhere else. WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT IN THIS? Sorry, look, I understand this game. I understand how mesmerising it is. How enthralling this would have been. How engrossing it is, to actually believe
there's a little intelligent man inside my computer. But this guy, Bobby, he winds me up. He's got an attitude and my time living with
him. Well, it hasn't been smooth, that's for sure. Most of the day, Bobby will just stroll around
the house. Perhaps he'll sit down and read the paper. Sometimes he'll watch a bit of TV, even play
his computer. But other times, he'll just sit at that piano
and play tune after bloody tune, for what seems like an eternity. I'll be there trying to listen to 2Unlimited's
Greatest Hits (and yes, this album does exist), and then Bobby will just start belting out
something classical. When he's bored of that he'll fire up his
record player and start boogying to some funk number. It's endless. He just loves the rhythm. The dance. The feel the wiggly air. He can't get enough of it. Sure I could turn the volume down on the TV,
but what if he starts speaking to me? What if he runs out of water and needs to
tell me about it? This guy gives me horrible flashbacks to the
virtual pet craze in the 90s. When playgrounds and street corners were rife
with hundreds of the little critters, all demanding attention, all needing something. Having that responsibility, combined with
the music, is... well, it gets a bit much. I did try being nice to him. You can press CTRL-P to pet the guy. CTRL-W to fill up his water. CTRL-F to send a food delivery and even CTRL-B
to deliver a new book, but in the end, I just wanted to kill the blighter. Especially after he kept going in these secretive
back rooms. What was he doing? What was he hiding from me? Did he have another master back there, a whole
new house side, with a different Commodore 64? I couldn't be sure, so I starved him of food. I starved him of water and I left him alone,
to fester. Whilst he did that I filled in the house deed,
to make sure I could claim ownership of his house when he was gone. It didn't take him long to turn green and
start moping around the house. He put himself to bed, and couldn't even get
up again. So what did I do? Yes, I rang his bed side alarm clock, over
and over and over and over. It got to the point where I started to feel
like the unreasonable one. Yes, I started feeling guilty. Then to make things worse, we started typing
me these heart-felt messages, and I honestly started feeling bad for the guy. Plus he wouldn't die anyway. I'd read rumours that you could kill off your
LCP, but even over multiple days, and sessions, I couldn't find away. I tried neglect, I tried to poison him with
excessive water intake, I even tried to burn the house down, but all to no avail. I decided to write this in the "Unusual Activities"
section of the handbook... "won't die. Possibly invincible" And then I went back to being nice. I decided to try some other things with Bobby. Some things we both could enjoy. It turns out Bobby likes playing poker. I mean, it's not a great version of poker,
but he likes it. He also likes anagrams, but good lord, the
developers came up with some monumentally obscure words to guess. Look at this one, can you get it? It turns out, it's INSOLE. But it's not exactly a word which springs
to mind. You don't use it on a day to day basis do
you? It's clear these games were squeezed in to
provide an actual activity for anyone who bought this expecting a game. You can instigate these games yourself, or
if he's bored, Bobby will invite you to play. If you don't play, he starts rapping on your
screen. Which is cute at first, but also quite annoying
after the 2nd attempt. In fact, as well as asking to play games,
you can type all manner of things to your LCP. Sometimes he'll respond. Other times, he won't bat an eyelid, but there's
actually quite a significant list of words LCPs will understand. Their compliance is in part down to how you
use them. For example, Bobby is much more happy to do
something if you say "please" first. If you don't, then he'll probably just keep
doing his own thing. Generally if you leave him alone, he'll do
his own thing, even having a bath and changing clothes at one point, which apparently, is
quite rare. He even has special moments for Christmas
day, like playing jingle bells on the piano. STOP IT BOBBY. In the end I had to step away from my bumpy
relationship with Bobby and look at this game objectively. For what it was trying to achieve. When I did that, I remembered that it was
truly significant. Let's think about it. This game popped up over a decade before the
Tamagotchi craze. It popped up well before games like the Sims,
and really it was an entirely new experience for any home computer owner in the 1980s. It's little wonder that despite the lack of
gameplay, it scored some extremely high reviews from the gaming press. It has it's limitations for sure, and it's
not going to keep you entertained non stop, but it does feel like a program I would have
left running in my bedroom, and made sure to show anyone who happened to be in the house. It's interesting, it's entertaining, it's
engaging, but yet I still feel like it never reached it's full potential. When I talk to Bobby, he speaks of Party's
he'd like to throw, of a room-mate he'd like to have, even of a cat he longs for. It's rumoured that these things were due to
arrive in an expansion, or even perhaps a sequel to the original game, but the original
release just wasn't popular enough to justify it. What it did spawn, were cut down versions
on cassette for the Commodore, Spectrum and even Amstrad CPC. These versions simply generated a random LPC
on each play. Nothing was saved to tape, and therefore the
feeling of friendship you built up with the original version was lacking from these subsequent
releases. Alongside the C64 version, there was a release
for the Apple II and there were even 16 bit versions for the Atari ST and Amiga, but again,
despite their disk form and upgraded graphics, they don't quite live up to the Commodore
64 version, for me at least. I mean in the ST version, he seems to be walking
around in steel heeled boots for one. Over in Japan, a Famicom version called Apple
Town Story also appeared, this time with a female character who gets furious when her
alarm goes off in the morning. To be honest, I relate to that more than anything
Bobby did. In a similar vein, there was also a version
for the PP-8801, appearing in 1987, blessed with the Little Computer People name. But within the boundaries of it's naming convention,
that's pretty much as far as Little Computer People Went. But, step outside those boundaries for a second,
and of course, we have the Sims. So how does that fit in with Little Computer
People? How did it help create a series which has
gone on to be phenomenally popular? Well, it's clear it shares a number of traits
with the Sims. It's like a half-way house between a virtual
pet and a Sims experience, but it's a game which Will Wright - creator of the Sims, did
actually play before embarking on his human simulator. He also received what he described as valuable
feedback on the Sims from the original designer of LCP, Rich Gold. So it's clear that Little Computer People
did actually play a significant part in creating the series played by so many today, and with
so many expansion packs. Really, quite a lot of expansion packs. Maybe it's best LCP didn't get those expansions. Anyway, however you see it, Little Computer
People is an intriguing and notable gem of history, and I certainty think it has contributed
a lot to gaming since. Clearly it influenced Will Wright, but I'm
sure it sparked the curiosity and creativity of countless others who dabbled with it on
Commodore 64s, Spectrums and Apple IIs across the world. It's worth picking up a copy, or just emulating
it today to get a taste of that. Who knows where we'd be without our Little
Computer People. As for you Bobby, you've got about 3 seconds
to get back into that Commodore circuitry before lights out. Too late Bobby. Bye Bobby.
My guy was named Ogden. I remember this game very fondly.
That book really makes the experience! I only had pirated copies of most of the games, including that one back in the day. (at one point I was the backup library for the local pirate group with around 800+ disks) I would have really enjoyed it more with the book. I wonder just how many other great experiences I missed because I was a poor kid who knew how to use Fast Hack'em and Punter protocol.
I enjoyed this as a child. Never saw the funky box or anything though.
If I had all the money, I'd buy every copy up and dump all of the ROMs online so all the LCPs could live on forever.