Back in the early 90’s, I spent a summer working in a retail store which did multiplayer 3D computer games, back before that was really a thing. “Virtual World Entertainment”. Big cockpit things with about a hundred functional controls in each; the sort of things that it’d take you quite a long time to fully master. Took itself and its rather intricate theme very seriously; we were each supposed to maintain character as a VGL scientist while working there. We sold history books about the alleged backstory of the Virtual Geographic League. I mean, we had them up on a shelf with price tags on. I can’t honestly claim to have ever witnessed one being sold, but you know what I mean.
Anyhow, the (massive) retail space was split pretty evenly in two; a slightly dilapidated victorian lounge in the front-of-store area (complete with a functioning bar), backed by an industrial-looking wall with emergency lights that would go off whenever a new group a guests were called to go on a mission. Behind that wall, the training areas, the “decontamination” sequence, and then an almost steampunk-ish back room, where all the tech happened and the games themselves were played. Pic:
I worked the register, manned the bar (for one disastrous evening), trained new players, ran the simulations, debriefed people afterwards, and… was kind of a junior mechanic for a little while, maintaining the aging hardware.
All of which is a really long way of getting to my point:
For me, Judge Reinhold will always be linked to the company’s new-player-training-films that he co-starred in, together with Joan Severance and a few other folks; I’d kick off one of these videos for a new group of players approximately once every eight minutes, eight to ten hours per day, virtually every day. Often it would be some particular bit of its audio that would notify me that it was time to switch from one job to another, as I shepherded three different groups through different stages of the process simultaneously. I could recite the lines from this thing in my sleep.
That one was for the “Battletech” game. The one below was the one for “Red Planet”, which was a hovercraft racing game set on Mars. And which contains a frankly startling number of celebrity cameos.
Hope this doesn’t count as derailing the topic. But for me, Judge Reinhold is inextricably linked to that time in my life. And this is always where my brain goes whenever he hits the news for any reason.
(Eventually VWE came out with new hardware and new versions of the games which used (gasp) texture mapping, in the fancy 4.0 Tesla-series cockpits. I understand that there are still a couple dozen of those floating around in various countries, often maintained by fans and not accessible to the public. But VWE itself seems to have mostly died, these days, and I’ve heard no word of what became of the ancient 2.5-3.0 cockpits that I worked with. Ah well.)
