Okay, so the first question you probably have is, "Why?", and if you're under the age of 40, followed shortly after by "What's a VCR", "What's a BBS" and finally "Why?" again because it really needs to be said twice.
It's 1991 and I'm living at home and freshly out of high school, aimless and bored as only a teenager can be. My main social group is comprised of people I met on bulletin board systems - computer forums you dial up on modems to hang out with a bunch of total fucking nerds because back then computers were still scary and hard, so normal people didn't own them. Where the internet is global, BBSes were mostly islands all to themselves, and due to the cost of long distance calls, usually inhabited by people from the same city which allowed for a tight feeling of community. It's there that people traded messages and files, chatted live, and played games, which were separate programs from the board - text-based games that the BBS would run, handing off the connection to the game, and taking it back when you were done. Hence "door".
In Toronto, there was a loose collection of boards that were affiliated with a group called YIP, who were interested only in absurdist humour and making fun of everyone and everything. My perfect social circle. These boards were set up to be silly, where nothing was serious or, honestly, made much sense at all. I look at the 'zines we made back then through my middle-aged distorted eyes and I can only shake my head, but at the time I considered it the height of sophistication.
So it's out of this foundation that VCR Challenge was born. I don't remember the exact genesis that birthed it - probably some late night laugh fest where we tried to out-absurd each other, high on JOLT cola. Anyway, I decided I should create the dumbest, most idiotic game based on what I considered to be the most mundane and dull activity possible: setting the time on a VCR.
I'm not sure I could come up with a premise more firmly rooted in 1991 than that. In a world dominated by streaming services that play anything you want on demand, the idea of reading a tiny newsprint magazine to figure out when your TV show was on and then having to manually set a mechanical device that records video on magnetic tape so it'll start at the right time and date is far more absurd than the idea of making that process a game. Of course, that is equally contrasted by the people who spend hours grinding for virtual gold in World of Warcraft, so perhaps the idea of amusing yourself by setting a VCR over and over isn't quite as far fetched as I imagined it was 30 years ago.
So, I made the game. It's a legit game - you play it, there's strategy and points. A high score table. It's sort of amusing for a few minutes. But it's not fun. There's a few chuckles in there and the ridiculously long and verbose instructions are hilarious in their novel-esque volume. I'm not sure I ever seriously thought it actually was fun, although I do remember holding out hope that maybe others would see the genius buried in there. As a work of art, though, to this day I think it is a legit triumph - an absurdist masterpiece. A turd polished to a shine so blinding, difficult to look at yet you cannot look away.
I only ever sold one copy, and it ran on the YIP boards but no one else ever really got the joke. As the 90's wore on, the Web started becoming a thing, and BBSes fell by the wayside as everyone left the islands and moved to the global community. I finally shut my own BBS down in 1997, finally giving it up after admitting that one call a week wasn't enough to justify paying for a phone line. The 20MB hard drive in that machine died shortly after, taking all my source files and existing copies of VCR Challenge with it, lost forever in the bit rot of changing data formats and unbacked up code.
I would occasionally bring it up at parties in my attempts to make conversation that wasn't about my job or the weather and I enjoyed the quizzical looks it would generate. No one quite believed me that it ever existed and I didn't have any proof that it did. Until now.
I received a message asking me if I was the person behind the game, to which I immediately and emphatically replied "YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES" and asked for a copy. They sent me a ZIP file containing a binary EXE of the game plus a surprisingly detailed documentation file. Somehow, my creation had survived the diaspora and came back to me. How the registration worked is lost to the sands of time but the game itself is amazingly, beautifully and completely functional. I nearly cried when I got it, like a long lost pet returning home.
Then I made it run in a web browser.
You're welcome.
UPDATE: My copy is now registered thanks to Tom Swartz who reached out again, only this time with a copy of the config file from my actual BBS to run a registered version. How he found that file I will never know or understand.