It was called Star Trek, but it didn't much seem like Star Trek. Sure, there were Klingons to shoot at, Sulu stood ready at the helm, and every so often an urgent subspace transmission from Starfleet would be patched in by Lieutenant Uhura -- but these were all words on the screen that had to be read. Shouldn't there be little spaceships flickering against a random star field? And to fire your phasers -- well, there was math involved. This was supposed to be a game?

Having never before used a computer (it's 1981, I'm eleven, sitting in front of an Atari 800 that was bought the previous day at auction), I wasn't quite sure what had gone wrong. So with a single day's computer and programming experience under my belt, I did the one thing I felt I could to salvage this, my very first development effort: I made the entire crew of the USS Enterprise swear like sailors, from Scotty, who was now more than a stereotype -- he was a charmless, insulting stereotype -- to an emotionless yet factually explicit Spock, who told it like it was.

The colorful language didn't quite make up for the lack of color, but it did help some.

Today my clueless hack would no doubt be called a mod.

Perhaps based on that first mod experience (or, knowing my own psychological history, perhaps seeking external validation that "depth" is an optional parameter, an axis that can be toggled on or off) the mods that most capture my imagination are those that arbitrarily add or subtract a dimension -- Unreal2D and Human Debris, which transform Unreal and Quake, respectively, into 2-D sidescrollers, and Ast3DX, which wraps code around the original Asteroids ROM to place the original Atari game into 3-D space.

It goes beyond simple retro appeal: Yes, anyone who's ever played Mario on the NES or Pitfall on the Atari 2600 will be intimately familiar with the "run, jump, kill, jump, jump, run" that is at the heart of any platform gamer, and Unreal2D is no different. But a 3-D shooter mapped into 2-D space also means an end to the paranoia -- it's no longer about what lurks around the next corner or who's fixin' to gib you from behind. The game isn't necessarily easier, but -- for me at least -- it's more like playing a game. If 2-D is less visceral, well, I eat enough Xanax as it is. And an even more claustrophobic Asteroids, courtesy of Ast3DX, further substantiates my point of view.

What at first seem oddities, though, appear with study to be the requisite permutations of any successful game title. It's almost as if every 2-D game needs the illusion of depth to protect it from the very triviality that was once its reason for being, while 3-D worlds ultimately need to steamroll themselves into the future, as if, through emerging from their texture-mapped shadows they might also emerge from a totalitarian immersion.

The recent orgy of 3-D adaptations -- Centipede, Pong, Pitfall, Lode Runner, Q*Bert, Space Invaders, Galaga, Breakout, and Missile Command, not to mention Donkey Kong 64 and Mario 64 -- might suggest that 2-D-to-3-D conversion is a recent phenomenon. Move away from this recent game industry gang bang, however, and you'll likely stumble across the tryst between 2-D and 3-D that birthed Pacmania. The successor to Pac-Land (the Pac-Man-derived platform gamer), Pacmania raised the Pac-Man maze to the next (3-D) level with its initial release as an arcade game in 1988. Wolfenstein 3D, the id Software title that led to Doom -- and subsequently to today's emphasis on 3-D space -- wouldn't launch until 1992, a full decade after the initial success of 1981's 2-D Castle Wolfenstein.

Today, a 3-D Wizardry is in beta; the original Wizardry, a landmark first-person 2-D gamer done up in beautiful hi-res graphics, was released in 1978. Two years later, 1980 would bring us the first-person Zork, which, like my Star Trek game, is text-only. It would be nearly a decade before Zork would display graphical content in 1988's Zork Zero; finally, in 1996, the game would develop into what almost seems an unavoidable eventuality: the first-person 3-D Zork Nemesis.

Which brings us back, in a roundabout way, to Star Trek -- which, I'll remind you again, was text-only. Now sometime between the 1981 assassination attempts on the president and the Pope, I would get my very own copy of Atari's Star Raiders. First released in 1979, Star Raiders was a first-person, 3-D version of Star Trek, sans the trademark infringement.

Even more interestingly, though, Star Trek itself was an attempt, back in 1971, to create a version of Spacewar, the world's first computer video game, on a Teletype (text-only) terminal. A 2-D graphical shooter dating back to 1962, Spacewar was open source; a slew of options and features were added by users of the game, including, yes, first-person perspective. The game was given an even longer lease on life when it was made object-oriented -- it became easier still for others to hack Spacewar. Thirty-odd years later, Doom would adopt this same model with the release of its source code, calling its user contributions, appropriately enough, "mods" -- and in the process rediscovering how the video-game age began.

Are you mod or a rocker? Share your thoughts in the FEED threads at Plastic...