I recently went through my old box of papers in the garage, and man did those maps bring back memories! So many hours spent painfully mapping things out on graph paper. Alternate Reality: The City was probably one of the biggest mapping projects I did, but I had a thick pile from many different games. The Bard's Tale series was especially noteworthy.

It's sad—if I were to attempt to play one of those today, I would give up immediately rather than deal with the insanely slow loading and glacially-paced gameplay. But at the time, I think the slowness contributed to the immersion. There was more than enough time to reflect and, well, map. It burned those experiences deep into my memory. Alternate Reality in particular was painfully, painfully slow on my computer, which was enormously frustrating at the time, and yet even though it was barely a game (you mostly wandered around exploring and getting annoyed at unimplemented buildings, with the occasional high-stakes combat) it is one of the more memorable experiences of my ill-spent youth.

The longish loading time for an encounter really did something interesting for immersion. It’s a little similar to a DM rolling dice to generate an encounter—that built in anticipation isn’t really possible in modern games without annoying gamers.