I was in Portland a couple of days early for The Game, but was happy to have some time to visit with relatives and be a tourist.
Thus on Wednesday afternoon, I was waiting at a light rail station near my airport hotel, waiting for a ride out to Beaverton.
Also waiting there was a talkative dude from Alabama. He had just moved to Portland. He'd come because he'd heard about a job on Craigslist. Once he showed up in Portland, the Craigslist poster had told him about the job's application fee. Talkative dude didn't want to pay, so he procrastinated... and when he called back a few days later, the "job" and the Craigslist poster had disappeared. It had been a scam, leaving him in Portland with no prospects. But he'd landed a job at a recycling plant. Then he looked for an apartment, again on Craigslist. But the roommates he found there kept turning out to be druggies. But now, a week after his arrival, he had a job and had found a place to live. It sounded like the start of some Horatio Alger story.
In Beaverton, I walked through a mini-mall until I got to Tektronix' business park. The Game that weekend was based on the 80s computer movies WarGames and Tron. Trying to anticipate surprises, I sought out 80s computer-y places, trying to think like a game designer. But the Tektronix business park didn't seem so puzzly-at first glance. It seemed hot, though.
Cousin Rae drove me over to her house, which had an awesome garden. When she moved in, it was patchy lawn and gravel. But her son-in-law Chad had done a bunch of... landscaping? I'm not sure what the right term is for making a garden garden-like as opposed to gravel-pit-like. But he'd done a lot and now the garden looked great. There were scarlet runner beans, flowers, and more lettuce than anyone could be expected to eat. Rae made dinner, fortunately using only a reasonable volume of lettuce. (This was especially fortunate because she made pasta in a tomato-based sauce, which does not benefit from bushelsful of... OK, I'll stop talking about the lettuce now.)
I told her I was in town for a puzzlehunt game based on 80s computer movies. Rae's son Ben lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a geek. He was telling her to read some book that I might like—about computer games, and the 80s... I guessed: was it Ready Player One? And it was. When Ben had heard about my puzzle game, he'd wanted to play. Hmm, someone in the SF Bay Area who wanted to play puzzlehunt games who hadn't yet. I made a note to contact him about the Octothorpe project.
Rae hoped that Game Control would send us up the Columbia River gorge, because it was gorgeous. There were trees and waterfalls and Bonneville Dam. (She predicted that part correctly.) Further east, there was an abrupt transition to desert. Out there was Maryhill, which had been planned as a utopian farming commune by a local mogul, but which had failed because farming a desert is hard; now it was an art museum with enough space for its own Stonehenge. I guessed that Game Control might send us out that way to see The Dalles, so that puzzly Googlers could get the thrill of proximity to a big data center. (It turned out that she was right about sending us up the gorge as far as Bonneville Dam.)
I'd forgotten to pack a pocketknife, but it turned out that Leatherman was based in Portland and had a showroom store across the street from my light rail station. So I bought a new pocketknife/wirestripper, which seemed like a fine choice for the upcoming game. (I wouldn't need it, as it turned out.)
After a train ride to the Eastside, I walked past Data Systems Plaza and a few blocks later I was at Free Geek, an organization which taught folks in the community to refurbish and use computers. I called up my cousin Dan Fineberg and he drove out to meet me there.
Free Geek had an awesome thrift store. There were refurbished computers, but there was other stuff, too. I'd failed to pack a mini-USB cable for my camera, but I picked one up for just a couple of bucks. Plus they had some old computer equipment: Kaypro, Osborne, an old teletype. Plus art on the walls including a Mario made from floppy disks. Oh man, I was sure that Game Control was going to send us here during the game. (I was wrong.)
Dan showed up and was pretty happy to see the old equipment. Dan did PR for high-tech companies; he'd been doing it for long enough such that he remembered when some of these machines were current. (Lest you think that Dan was some kind of dinosaur, I should point out that I remembered some of these machines, too... though maybe that just means that I'm a dinosaur too. Anyhow.)
The great thing about a store that sells cheap computer parts is that you'll bump into other geeks there. Dan bumped into Jeff (Jim?). Dan and Jeff (Jim?) had worked together at GSS, a spinoff from Tektronix who'd worked on a sort of device-independent graphics firmware "library" called DGIS back in the days when MS Windows was a new thing and pretty much every program needed its own set of graphics drivers.
Dan took me out for lunch at an Eastside restaurant called MaiThai that was mighty tasty.
I grilled Dan about possible 80s-era tech places that GC might send us. He had a bunch of good ideas, none of which GC used. Intel had a bunch of buildings around the Jones Farm Parkway area of Aloha. There was the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant. (Actually, there wasn't; it had been demolished a while back.) There was the Evergreen Aviation (CIA front corporation) and Space museum in McMinnville—but it was a ways out of town.
Dan dropped me off near Mill Ends Park on the west side of the Willamette river. I walked up to Couch Street and then along it, stopping in Floating World Comics on my way to look at Ground Kontrol. Ground Kontrol was a video arcade. Tron had a video arcade, so I was pretty sure that Game Control would send us here. (And I was right!) I visited Ground Kontrol long enough to map out the location of its video game cabinets (information we didn't use during the game) and play several quarters of the Tron videogame and a couple of quarters of Discs of Tron. (GC did have us play Discs of Tron during the game, but it's not clear that they insisted that we do so skillfully; I doubt that this pre-game "preparation" helped any.) I walked up, past the site of the now-defunct Powell's Technical Books. I picked up some sandwich fixings and cookies at a grocery store to have food for the van. I stopped by a parking lot whose periphery had been taken over by food carts. I procured a burrito before calling it a day.
Had a tasty breakfast at The Original. Since I knew I'd spend all too much time over the weekend sitting still, I walked over the Hawthorne Street bridge and enjoyed a stroll through Eastside. I keep hearing about the "bustling" Hawthorne District, but when I'd visited ten years before, it had seemed pretty quiet. It seemed quiet again this visit, too. I poked my head into a vacuum museum and then it was time to head back to the hotel to get ready for Friday evening game activities.
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