While it’s debatable if Lewis Carroll was high as a kite sipping opiates when he chronicled Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole, the mental state of software programmers during the video game industry’s infancy is beyond dispute: they were most definitely #$&@ed up.
Stories abound about Atari’s liberal drug culture, and Konami, Midway, and Namco must’ve cultivated similar care-free environments. Aside from way too much Jefferson Airplane and serious amounts of mind-altering substances, there’s no logical explanation for how these late-1970’s masterminds transcended to such levels of 8-bit psychedelica.
Those Aren’t Muskets shows us how it all went down: