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The Management Spotlight
When you look up and find yourself inadvertently in its fearsome gaze!
Do you remember the original 8-bit game The Sentinel¹?
If you’re a progressive software engineer, IT aficionado, or just living in a data centre and can’t find your way out, and are of a certain age having spent their formative years with an 8-bit home computer during the 1980s, then there’s a very good chance that you will.
I first came across The Sentinel during the time I spent with my trusty BBC Micro amidst the frankly impressive 1980s — that time of big hair, Duran Duran, Nena, Nik Kershaw, the Big Bang, and a whole plethora of astoundingly imaginative, revolutionary computer games.
There was a whole revolution going on with computing and a whole generation of future programmers were being formed (not conceived, that’s just a strange thought) in those tiny shops crammed full of cassettes, in those dark bedrooms lit by x-ray emitting 12" CRT screens, and between solitary figures exchanging small bags of tapes in dark doorways, just before tea time on a Saturday.
The premise of the game was, in short, to raise yourself (as the player) physically upward by teleporting yourself across a procedurally drawn landscape — into ‘bodies’ you had previously created — all whilst avoiding the gaze of a sinister rotating Sentinel (looking…
