Interesting, isn't it? When I was around 10 I had after school access to a lab full of Mac Classics, which had The Manhole installed, and it was about that age that my two best friends and I started working on our first "games" in HyperCard and screensavers in Perl. They were also both banned from having consoles at home, which was a reason we became friends... other kids would go home but we wanted to stay at school late because it was where we had access to Macs. All three of us ended up adjacent to the game industry at one point or another. I remember going to other kids' houses and being blown away by (and terrible at) NES games. Something like Mario 2 seemed impossible to imagine programming for me at the time. Something like The Manhole, though, or even "Glider" could reveal its hypertalk mechanics. So maybe that had more to do with where I went than trying to do text adventures in BASIC on an IBM PC at home.
