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The Shanghai Story: Mahjong, Computers, and Adversity
Behind one of the ’80s most popular computer games is an impressive story about how an early computer helped a man find a path forward after a debilitating injury.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
It’s hard to track the history of mahjong solitaire, a Chinese game that came to America sometime in the 1920s, but one thing is for sure: More than 30 years ago, an electronic version of the game quietly took the computing world by storm.
Less known is the truly impressive feat that game represented. Originally built on the PLATO computing platform by Brodie Lockard in 1981, the computer game was groundbreaking both on a technical basis — the educational platform PLATO, as I wrote recently for Motherboard, inspired a lot broken ground — but also a personal one for Lockard.
As author Brian Dear writes in his new book The Friendly Orange Glow, Lockard, a Stanford University student, developed his digital version of mahjong just two years after a serious gymnastics accident nearly took his life and left him paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to even breathe on his own after the accident without an artificial apparatus, let alone use his hands to type on a keyboard, Lockard made a special request during his long recovery in the hospital: He wanted a PLATO terminal.
“He probably would never walk or move his arms or legs again, which meant no typing at a keyboard, but he still could think, he still had ambitions, he was still burning with ideas,” Dear wrote in the book. “On PLATO his disabilities would not matter. PLATO was a meeting of minds, pure and simple, and Brodie’s mind was fine.”
It took time, but access to that machine — provided by an employee of Control Data Corporation, the main vendor of the platform — helped Lockard create a path forward after a major accident. Despite having to type on the machine with the use of a mouth stick, he had become adept at programming for the early platform. On top of that, his stay at the hospital made him aware of something that would eventually bring him great success: mahjong…
