Another contributor on here, Flem, is currently reading Snow Crash. I was flabbergasted. Not over the fact that he’s reading it, just that he’s only reading it now. I guess I had assumed that most guys in/around my age bracket had read this work of near-future genius years ago. Like in the early 90s when I read it. No? Huh. Granted, I’ve got a few years on him, but I still thought this was more popular than it is. The interesting thing is that it seems that it’s getting more popular with time. It’s consistently been in print since sometime in 1992.

The memory for me that sticks out is reading it for the first time, when I was about 21 or so – in 1993. And here’s why it sticks out: I read the book only because it came bundled with a computer game I really wanted: Spectre VR for my Mac. Yes, I said MAC. I had a Mac LCIII (which was the bomb, I’ll have you know) and I liked space shooters, so Spectre VR was the shit. It didn’t hurt that VR was all the rage those days. Snow Crash was not much more than a side benefit. Gravy. I’d never heard of this ‘Neal Stephenson’ guy before. But I was big into comic books back then and Snow Crash came off like a comic book made into a novel. Ridiculously high-tech, amazingly well-written, with page after page of laugh-out-loud situations. I loved it.

Spectre VR faded, but Snow Crash lived on. I got an updated version. I read it again. Soon, I forgot what game I ever got it with. Today, when talking to Flem, I had this memory that I had gotten it with a game. After trying to figure out which one it was, I couldn’t find any reference to that ever happening anywhere on the good ol’ reliable Interwebs. Hmmm. I dug deeper. I found StarGlider, which I had had on my Atari ST. I figured that must have been it; Rainbird made it and they were well known for bundling novellas with their games. In this case, a sci-fi novella by James Follett.

But I wasn’t sure. So I kept searching. And it turns out it couldn’t have been StarGlider as it was made way earlier than Snow Crash was written. Up till now, I’d been searching for Atari games. I vaguely remembered that I had had a Mac at some point in the distant past and looked into that a bit. Eventually I stumbled across TorleyLives and discovered that he, too, knew that Snow Crash came with a game – a game called Spectre VR. Finally I could put my near-middle-aged brain to rest. I wasn’t crazy.

The game was decent – for its time. But the book… ahhh the book. I still have it on my shelf at home and re-read it every few years.

Factoid: The term ‘avatar’, though not coined by Stephenson with respect to your virtual character, was used by him in Snow Crash. It is because of this usage that we refer to our in-game characters as ‘avatars’ today.

For those that are itching to see what a game looked like in 1993 on a Mac: