Only You Can Save Mankind

What Hacker News says

1. jleesAug 2015
   I think another part of it was the effort required to try out new titles; I got very attached to the Dizzy series because I had to save up my pocket money and actually go to the computer shop to buy the tape. And that shop certainly didn't stock 15,000 different games :) Kind of the same way music discovery used to be, only with demo tapes instead of the radio. (I still wonder if the demoscene could come back somehow.)

   With the barrier to entry being that of downloading a Minecraft mod or free app, it's harder to get anywhere near as attached, in my opinion; but I don't have kids, so I wonder what they do spend their hard-earned pocket money on instead?

   For a similar nostalgia trip I recommend reading Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett.

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2. exidyFeb 2026
   Partly it was an anti-Wobbler thing. Someone in America or somewhere thought it was real clever to make the game ask you little questions, like “What’s the first word on line 23 on page 19 of the manual?" and then reset the machine if you didn’t answer them right, so they’d obviously never heard of Wobbler’s dad’s office’s photocopier.

   -- Only You Can Save Mankind, Terry Pratchett, 1992

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3. wilsonrocksJul 2020
   'Cool's cool.'

   I don't have my hard copy here and Google is failing me but this is addressed by Terry Pratchett in (I think) Only You Can Save Mankind.

   The context is some teen-agers talking about how it's not cool to say Yo, or Crucial, or Well Wicked, but Cool is always cool.

   Would appreciate the full quote if somebody can find!

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4. ajlburkeFeb 2013
   "Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called 'Journey to Alpha Centauri'. It was a screen with some dots on it. ... He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.' "

   - Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind

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