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If there's a genre of videogames today that diversifies players like no other, it's the walking simulator. Many examples have found favour, especially at Eurogamer, with Firewatch and, latterly, Virginia, both well-received. Yet for every praiseworthy voice, there are critics, keen to expose this style of game for being over-hyped, underwhelming and, frankly, boring. Like so much else in games, the walking simulator is not a new phenomenon, and its roots can be traced back to the 1980s. In a decade that saw its fair share of innovation, mixed with rampant cloning and bandwagon-jumping, freelance developer (ie bedroom coder) Graham Relf came up with the idea of a purely explorative game, a procedurally-generated terrain and countless locations to visit and search. Explorer had a suitably apt title but, despite its technological achievement, it was met with indifference in the gaming press of the time. However, Explorer's, and its author's, story began 15 or so years earlier.
"Computers were very new when I was at school," begins Relf. "I didn't get near one until I was a physics student at Imperial College. There was a short course in FORTRAN in my second year and I took to it like a duck to water." The year was 1969; code was produced on punched cards which were then submitted into the College's IBM7904 mainframe. There were no terminals on desks, discs, or even cassettes. "We'd get the printed output the next day - if we were lucky - then, of course, it took many attempts to iron out the bugs." Despite this painstaking process, Relf gained employment with an R&D company in 1974, occasionally indulging in the immense luxury of actually being able to input code via a teletype terminal.
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