Why I spent so much time in Bubble City in 1986


I'm not really a video games kinda guy, but back in 1986 I spent a lot of time playing Roadblasters, and I learned very quickly to start in Bubble City, which was level 12. It became an important life lesson for me in a way that I've been able to use all of my life. I'll see if I can explain.

No, this blog post isn't about video games, it's about life. My life changed dramatic when I was 28, had recently moved to Los Angeles, and got a new job that was going to require me to do something that was very new at the time: desktop publishing. Nowadays, of course it's a given that graphic designers work on computers, but back then it was still a radical idea, and one that I wanted to embrace.

Luckily, I've always been an abstract thinker, and it occurred to me that I would have go from using a drawing board (yes, I'm that old!) to using a computer screen, which I'd never done before. The only people who had used computers were the old-school computer nerds, which wasn't what I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn how to create artwork on a computer screen. So there was really no one who could help me.

So I went to the 7-11, put a quarter in a video game (yes, they only cost a quarter back then!) and, since I love driving, tried out a driving game. The point of the game was to make it to the next checkpoint without running out of gas - which you had to swerve around and pick up as you went. If you didn't pick up enough gas along the way, you just ran out of gas, and the game was over. My first goal was to make it all of the way to Bubble City, which is what you see at the top of this post.

It was hugely frustrating, but I kept going back. And then one day I made it to Bubble City, and I was so happy! After that, it started to get easy, and slightly boring to have to drive Bubble City, and that's when I learned that you could actually start there. I had found a level that challenged me.

I never really made it beyond Bubble City. A few years later I just stopped playing, and I had learned what I needed to know. I was comfortable with a screen interface, and I had also learned the importance of finding a level that's interesting, not too much, not too little, in life. I've always called it my "Bubble City".

My Bubble City continues to change all of the time. I become fascinated with something new, and once it gets boring, I go find something else. Luckily, the world keeps changing all of the time around me, and I'm still having fun.

Welcome to Bubble City!

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