Science & Tech Quote by Roberta Williams

A sly little act of mythmaking hides inside that breezy “I always say.” Roberta Williams isn’t just naming a favorite; she’s staking a claim in the origin story of an entire medium. By pointing to “Original Adventure” and pinning it to “back in 1980,” she’s compressing a messy, overlapping prehistory of games into a clean, legible milestone: there was a before, and then there was the moment the spell took.

The name-drop of “both Microsoft and Apple Computer” is doing extra work. It’s a wink at the era when personal computing still felt like a hobbyist frontier and the platform wars were young enough to be porous. If the same game could live under both banners, the real point isn’t corporate lineage; it’s cultural reach. Adventure wasn’t a niche curiosity trapped in one ecosystem. It was a traveling text, a shared reference point, the kind of experience that teaches you what a computer can be besides a calculator.

Williams’s profession matters here. As a designer who helped define narrative games, she’s signaling her DNA: interactive fiction, problem-solving, story as a space you move through. “Favorite game” is also a safe, almost casual framing for a professional thesis: that the medium’s deepest hook isn’t reflex or spectacle, but curiosity turned into mechanics. The nostalgia isn’t sentimental; it’s strategic, using a personal preference to legitimize an older, text-forward idea of what games are for.