The Big Picture and the Closeup

As the sun was sliding down the horizon, carrying her away, the song in my cassette player was Teach Me Tonight, in Al Jarreau’s then-recently-released version. I kept replaying it, and it made me feel a little better.

The cave journey Vollenweider and friends charted out felt less sinister and dangerous than the cave journey the programmers responsible for Adventure contrived, but they each appealed to the same place in my head. Jointly these two creations, the game and the album, served as the perfect expression of the computer journey I embarked on at that point. You venture into mysterious places, develop new skills, and bring back all sorts of treasures from those mysterious caves we now call cyberspace.

I placed the climactic sex scene in the house of a friend of mine in Baltimore’s Federal Hill. I knew exactly, from well before I wrote it, what the characters would do, and what they would say — and what music I wanted playing when, later on, someone made a movie of it.