Everyone loves and appreciates a winner, right? However, when it comes to a dynasty, the love and appreciation aren’t quite there. That goes to say for Tom Brady and his previous NFL team, the Patriots; the multiple eras of the New York Yankees who were despised; and even the UConn women’s basketball team that people had enough of due to their consistent wins. When it comes to Alabama college football, there’s the Alabama Dynasty.

A Long Streak for the Alabama Dynasty

The Crimson Tide has had an unprecedented run of success over the years, but how much is too much exactly? They’ve won 6 of the 18 total national titles over the past 12 seasons. Aside from that, they’ve had 3 Heisman Trophy winners, quite a few NFL first-round picks, and a top-ranked recruiting class for multiple consecutive years which all add up to form the Alabama Dynasty that people are getting tired of.

Some people are looking for more diverse college football. For the past 10 years, there has been a lack of parity, and it’s not good for the sport as a whole. Alabama earned spots in 6 of the 7 College Football Playoffs. They’ve also played in 5 title games and won 3 of them. Before this, in only 4 years, Alabama won 3 BCS championships.

The other side to the Alabama Dynasty is the supporters claiming a dominant team is necessary since everyone will be chasing that team. It’s the one team in every sport that everyone tries to knock off.

Dominating College Football

The Alabama Dynasty is what forced the rest of the league to work together to knock them out. In 2019, LSU won the title, Georgie faced off Alabama back in 2017 for the title game, and Auburn got a chance to play for a national title 2 times in the past 11 years.

Alabama has had quite a few blowout games over the past few years under Nick Saban. Since their 2009 season, the Crimson Tide has won 101 games by at least 20 points or more and 61 games by at least 30 points or more. Their overall record has been 153-15.

In the early 1980s, when computer games were frequently distributed as lines of code that required manual entry, Harry McCracken, a teenage TRS-80 enthusiast, and future Fast Company technology editor, had a text adventure with the title Arctic Adventure published in The Captain ’80 Book of Basic Adventures. As originally published, the game’s code was compromised. McCracken finally fixed it forty years later.

Early computer magazines were densely packed with pages of code that eager PC enthusiasts could type in and experiment with. People recall sitting in front of old computers for hours as a preteen, hunting and pecking all over the keyboard as they enter someone else’s BASIC code. Once they enter all the code, they either have a game to play or several more hours poring over the code to determine what they’d entered incorrectly.

McCracken Was Still in High-School When Publishing Arctic Adventure

According to PC Gamer, young McCracken was in high school when he wrote his arctic-themed adventure game. McCracken was inspired to create a survival game by the work of legendary adventure game developer Scott Adams. The player was tasked with returning to their base before succumbing to the harsh arctic environment. He had no prior knowledge of the arctic and conducted no research, which is fine. It’s not as if anyone on Wikipedia was going to fact-check it.

The game was published, McCracken was paid, and he continued to create games before focusing on creative writing. He got feedback on Arctic Adventure from someone associated with the software company owned by the book’s editor, Bob “Captain 80” Liddil, who informed him that the game did not work.

Better Late Than Never!

McCracken spent the next four decades or so doing things unrelated to Arctic Adventure, having never received a copy of the book in which his code was published and not keeping a copy of the code for himself.

He recently got his hands on a copy of The Captain ’80 Book of Basic Adventures, however, thanks to internet archivists, and with the help of a TRS-80 emulator for his iPad, he was able to type in his code and get the game running.