Captain Thingy just landed the ISS Starry Eyed on the 3rd planet of the neighboring k-class system (mind you, the entire crew just dumbly allowed him to do it) and the ship was crushed by gravity. I had forgotten to check and see if the planet's gravity exceeded the 8.0G limit. I was sad. You can find an [emulated copy of starflight][1] on the web, but you can’t go back to the spring air wafting in the back window, smelling like cyan and magenta and a Tandy 1000 all to yourself. Remember when your piano teacher said to give the Mozart sonata a more personal name, so it would mean something to you and you could draw on the meaning when you played it? and that the best name you could think of for a piece so full of sunshine and clarity was--*King's Quest?* Yeah, you can't go back to the rolling fields of Daventry either, can you? The perfect chirping of the birds, the way you could practically feel the breeze and the spray off the river in the gulch? The sense of endless time and magic, of space beyond the screen? Every screen was a magic painting, a living tapestry, a face of the divinatory hypercube--the limitations of the graphics were a strength--instead of dirty stinking "realism," instead of a crass reproduction of life, it transcended. Specific choices had to be made about which elements would animate. If something moved, there was a reason for it to be moving. The few blurry pixels of Graham's face--like an inchoate avatar of your own youth--invited a serene transference that few products of today's hyperconnected viral chaosphere can hope to emulate--even *with* an emulator. (But then there's Minecraft! Reassuringly blocky yet fully editable--a Daventry where you make your own screens and story--surely as much a language as a game. Hey, languages *are* sandbox games....) (2015) [1]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Starflight_1986