YOUR DESKTOP PAL

Tracking down JOHNNY CASTAWAY, the forefather of virtual pets

- Philip Palmer

My earliest PC gaming memories are haunted by a shipwrecked sailor, stuck on a desert island. For the longest time I couldn’t remember who this spectre of my gaming past was. His bedraggled appearance and amusing antics – building sand castles and feuding with a seagull that wanted to sit on his hat – didn’t belong to the first level of the original Duke Nukem (which I never got past), or any other childhood favourites.

Not Chopper Commando, not Lighthouse: The Dark Being, and not Quest for Glory. This mystery sailor remained shipwrecked in my brain, and after years of ignoring him, I finally dedicated myself to unravelling the mystery on a slow afternoon: his name was Johnny Castaway, and he wasn’t actually from a game at all, but instead a screensaver released in 1992 by Sierra On-Line.

A GAME IN SCREENSAVER CLOTHING 

Screensavers are nearly forgotten today. Older gamers may fondly remember flying toasters and tangled masses of colourful pipes, but modern displays have no need to prevent burn-in like now-obsolete plasma and CRT monitors. But Johnny Castaway didn’t share much in common with the typical ’90s screensaver. When it was released in 1992, Johnny Castaway marketed itself as “the world’s first storytelling screensaver” and the description was apt. Stuck on a desert island with a single coconut tree, Johnny was a bearded man in shorts and a sea captain’s hat. Every time the screensaver would start, you would get a glimpse into Johnny’s ongoing predicament, watching as he climbed his tree for coconuts, tried to start a fire and failed at fighting off a seagull.