The Airport

If it was the author's choice to release this four room programming exercise to the world at large as a game, it was potentially a strange one. All I know about the title's provenance is that it describes itself as "a simple demonstration Mystery/Puzzle game". With its content of four rooms, one locked door puzzle (I hesitate to call it a puzzle when the key is in plain sight) and some other objects which are painted on, it offers no challenge or development. It really is just a skerrick of programming set in an airport in which you move the protagonist through a locked door to win.

Acknowledging The Airport in the odd context in which I find it, it does have a few amusing qualities. The volume of text in the default help menus included with the game outweighs the game content by a ratio of about 20 to 1. The game's introduction, which is more verbose than anything that follows, describes the PC thus: "You’re Priya Kapoor. You’re a 28 year old half South Indian, half Arab Muslim woman who works as a senior accountant at Tully’s Coffee’s heaquarters in Seattle." Ethnicity has no bearing on the game content that's here. The funniest thing is that if you glance at the television in the airport lounge, you learn that in the reality of this game, Bill Gates has become the president of the USA, and that Peter Garrett, former frontman of the band Midnight Oil and currently Australia's Federal Minister for Education, has become the Prime Minister of Australia.