The Gate(way) of Peacocks

The big thing to notice on the Gateway page is Roger Allen's transliteration of an English message into a modified Greek alphabet. The only strained substitution here is 'psi' used as 'y' - the sound value is not nearly the same, but it 'looks right'. As you will soon see, Roger's complete substitution is:

The new letters in red adjust for the changes that have come in just this recent Millennium! - 'J' came in in 1524 with Gian Giorgio Trissino. Looks like he wanted to make sure that Jesus' name was pronounced correctly, and borrowed a convention of making the last i in a series of i's in a Roman numeral look different - so, xiij would stand for 13. If GGT had been Roger Allen, I would have expected at least one 'J' would have been added to his own name.

The letter 'U' was added in the late middle ages to distinguish between the consonant 'V' and the vowel 'U'. As we see in monumental works with words like 'REPVBLIC', 'V' had to do double duty in the past.

I have not seen this anywhere else - this scheme may be original with Allen. I have seen words like 'electron' rendered in Greek, and instantly recognized it - but when you are faced with pages and pages of Greekified text, it helps to just transliterate it to a separate page for legibility.

This topic is even more relevant this month, when the media made a fuss about hurricane 'Zeta' as if that was the end of the Greek alphabet - but Zeta is near the beginning of the traditional Greek alphabet order. As the good book says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End."

We have now passed through the Gateway by selecting 'ZBS-Infinity', and the first thing we see is the big eye. This is Rene Magritte's 'The False Mirror' (1929). Magritte was a founding Surrealist, and his drawing feature was to put everyday objects and views in startling juxtapositions - like having the blue sky and clouds in a disconcerting close up to an eye.

I have copied the original here - but the black and white version has an interesting effect all its own, the shading and screentone that Macpaint was justly famous for works extremely well here.

Roger Allen worked with a museum before and as he was preparing the game, producing exhibit animations and study materials in Hypercard. So he had a rigorous training in the production arts that were necessary to get the game package together - much like my previous life had me producing slides and reports where I gathered and fabricated graphics like the ones I use here.