The 3.5” floppy disk drive let out a pained, mechanical shriek and the operating system bombed, the system’s guts irreparably confounded by my inscrutable father’s failed attempt to conjure a ten-dimensional, Lovecraftian artefact on something as powerful as a calculator. “Dad, don’t.”īut he was as unresponsive as the Atari itself, possessed by some unseen force, sliding the mouse to the render button and clicking a single, inevitable click. “Dad,” I pleaded, the maddening nest of garbled lines reflected in his glasses. With each fresh click the Atari took longer to respond, until at last the monitor was a nonsense web of overlapping edges and clipped geometry. Clicking over and over, the man began adding vertices anywhere they would fit, hundreds of them, tracing the outline of some impossible, non-Euclidean solid.

We had been playing about with some primitive CAD software, plotting out simple shapes to render low polygon urns when he fell eerily silent. When I was seven years old, my dad broke our Atari ST.

This week, he returns to the simulated killing fields of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.

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