TR-49 is an early Game of the Year contender

I’m going to start this review with some trite cliches, but I promise they make sense in the context of the game I’m about to talk about — they're kind of the whole point, in fact.

There is power in the stories we tell. Stories put ideas in our heads and alter our reality, at least for a little while. And that means they have the power to, if you’ll forgive the pretentiousness, change the world. 

That power (mixed with a little quantum mechanical hand-waving) is the heart of TR-49. Which is a lofty statement for a game that takes place entirely on a single screen and has a grand total of one input to interact with.

The titular TR-49 is the code name for the Textual Reassociator, an early computer built in 1949. The computer amounts to a microfiche machine and an attached box where you can enter a four-character code.

Microfiche has been in use for well over a century, but there’s an undeniably cool, retro, mysteriousness to it. It was never really a daily use technology for most people — I still remember the day in elementary school coughmumbleshutup years ago when we went to the library to learn how to use the special microfiche machine. And then I never used it again.

You’ve probably seen it in movies since it’s mostly obsolete in a digital world. Basically, you take a bunch of pages of something, print it really, really small on a photo negative, and then use a glorified magnifying glass to look at it.