Whenever I listen to AC/DC, I instantly remember of Neverwinter Nights. It’s kinda weird, but it kinda makes sense: I bought my NwN’s hard box copy (which I still have) and a CD version of Back in Black together, in the same place.
(It was in a hypermarket.)
When NwN was being installed, Back in Black was playing on my CD stereo. The feeling of a lazy afternoon listening to hard rock and taking the first steps into Neverwinter (after reading the manual while it was being installed) was permanently burned into my mind, I guess, even though my memory of it is not as clear as I would like. There are vague remembrances of the sound the computer made while installing the game, of the temperature that day, of kids playing in the street, and of Hells Bells playing in the background.
So, whenever I hear any song from Back in Black, specifically, playing anywhere, I’m transported back to that day. Not to the memory of it, but to the feeling of it, which is pretty warming.
Nowadays I’ve been somewhat obsessed with music trackers (a thing I didn’t know existed up until a few years ago), and many have these old-school late-80s or early-90s GUI which I find amazing. I don’t know if it’s nostalgia from the “simple times” (this is sarcasm, computers were never simple), or if it’s that modern UI is so convoluted and unoptimized for the user (like those few pixel-wide scroll bars on websites, ugh) that I miss seeing things clearly labeled in a square-ish font inside of clearly defined boxes.
One of these trackers, “Adlib Tracker II”, is made to run on original hardware, but also works on DOSBox with great results. And, oh man, I wasn’t prepared to use DOS again, even if emulated.
Let me be clear: DOS is cool, but I hate it. I had classes learning to code in Clipper, which was edited and compiled in DOS. That’s probably why I hate terminal-based software. But, anyway, we had to create fully functioning software with an interface in DOS. In the end, I think I probably like the “DOS-aesthetic interface” more than DOS itself, because I think Adlib Tracker II looks awesome.
The thing, though, is that opening DOSBox brought back lots of memories of running games in a 486 (I think) my parents had in my father’s auto shop. As soon as they bought that computer in the late 90s, they also bought a few of those magazines with game demos. I played a lot of Duke Nukem 3D, Magic Carpet, and Cyberia, but don’t remember too much about them (except for Duke Nukem, which I kept replaying on later computers). However, I do remember the feelings evoked by the games’ sounds on those old IBM speakers (probably Aptiva speakers), the noise the computer made (it was fanless, but there was a PC speaker, and the CRT monitor whined a bit while turning on).
Even more, I think my brain imprinted the acoustic of that back office, which doubled as storage for documents, with the smell of gasoline, oil, and grease that the auto shop had. There was a filing cabinet my mother would come in sometimes to open and grab something, and that added to the ambiance created — I remember the echo objects made in that space.
They kept the computer there for quite a while, so I often would spend the afternoon there, after school. Classes went from 9AM to 1PM, and my parents couldn’t always take me home after lunch, as we lived on the opposite side of town, so all that there was to do was play with the computer in the back office of the auto shop.
Later they would move the computer to the front office, use it there for a few months, go back to a paper system after a bug crashed the software they were using (I played on DOS, but the software ran on Windows 95, which is self-explanatory), and finally move the computer to our house, where it would sit in our dining room — a staple location in most Brazilian households that had a computer at the time.
So, now I find it funny that I barely remember details from these moments, but sometimes there is something that triggers another thing, and suddenly I get briefly washed in nostalgia, but instead of memories, I get the feel of something, of the smells, of the sounds, and a blurry image from the past.
I don’t yearn to return to those times, but it does make me want to recreate those feelings in the present. That’s probably why whenever I smell grease and gasoline1, I feel at home2.
- Please, don’t go around sniffing petrochemicals. ↩︎
- After reading this a second time, it was looking too familiar. After racking my brain for a while, I remembered why:
“Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Maureen.”
Memory is such a weird thing. ↩︎