The Most Important Video Game Ever (For Me)

Over the years, I’ve played lots of video games and loved a great many of them: from side-scroller bliss with the Mario series to adult meditations on humanity (The Last of Us), Nietzschean philosophy (Dark Souls), and surviving grief (Silent Hill 2). While some of these were moving if not profound, the game that changed my life the most was “LOGIC LEVELS.”

This game stands out because it ultimately presaged my interest in logic and gates and also making hands-on learning fun. This seed would lead to the dial-up internet on a SCO V Unix in a shell; it would lead to the BBS era; it would lead to the philosophy degree and the IS degree and all those elective hours chocked full of foreign languages … just pretty much everything that I like. In some ways, there was a seed of me-ness on that Commodore 64 5¼ inch diskette.

As for the game play, perhaps showing is better than telling:

But what’s been so vexing about this game is that for the last several decades, I couldn’t remember its name and had the frustrating task of describing something that meant a lot to me, but which the world, largely, seemed to have forgotten.

I described this game for dozens of people over the past few decades and no one could ever recall the name or say that they’d even heard of it.

Oftentimes, people assumed I was talking about The Incredible Machine. While TIM certainly had some of the same aspects, it was a much richer world and the goal was to build complex Rube Goldberg contraptions – beyond what a computer “kid” could readily grasp. LOGIC LEVELS was friendly and much less sophisticated. The tools (bridges, springs, walls) were more pictorial and less representational.

As hinted at by its publisher, Fisher-Price, LOGIC LEVELS was targeted at young kids who were just starting to understand cause and effect and how the world “inside the screen” could have a logic and physics that acted a lot like the world “outside the screen.” Ultimately the goal was simple: have a Magic Hand drop a ball at the top of a structure: use bridges and walls and springs and paint-cans to help the ball arrive at prizes without either a) falling out of the structure (kersplat) or b) running out of energy. The game had a particularly video game like mechanic in that once the ball was rolling, you couild use the joystick to make your placed bridges move side-to-side or walls move up-and-down. So, in this mechanic, LOGIC LEVELS taught some of the anticipation/timing/action that underlie pretty much all video games.

I found LOGIC LEVELS’s instructions in the Internet Archive.

It was so simple, yet so much fun. It has all the bones of programming right there: constraints, goals, flow control (almost literally), running in production (kersplat), and debugging.

I’ve used LOGIC LEVELS as a reference for how a programming language for kids could work (usually against Minecraft of MIT’s Scratch). I’ve also used LOGIC LEVELS as a reference for how a game or any learning experience should be intuitive while fun, while also training you to ever-better outcomes.

I did a small search to find out if I could find anything about the author(s): Frieda Lekkerkerker Inc. Judging by the name, it seems to have been the product of one single visionary. It appears they released other education- and child-oriented games as well that focused on memory and logic (two things I have come to define my life by).

I can’t imagine what tools they must have programmed this in: BASIC, maybe Prolog? It would have been darned hard to get this kind of physics horsepower out of the C64. The games are now considered abandonware: one can readily find the game for download. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s keeping the intellectual property lawyers on retainer for LOGIC LEVELS.

And that’s too bad. This game was a fun introduction to structured thinking. If I could find Frieda Lekkerkerker Inc. today, I’d like to tell them or Frieda herself, that the game did indeed educate children, and that the influence of that game on at least one life was substantive. If, by chance, anyone who was ever part of Frieda Lekkerkerker Inc. finds this, reach out so that I can thank them.