Somewhere that was not quite a beginning, but certainly a start, there was a table. In the late months of 1979, Roberta Williams sat down at this table, a kitchen table, and began to design a computer game. This design contained no code, no instruction sets, no sense of how the game she wrote would function on a computer. Roberta was not a programmer; she was a housewife and mother of two who claimed she “didn't even know how to plug a computer in” (Eklund, 1987, 9). But if not a programmer, she was, by her own admission in later interviews, obsessed; as she put it in 1983, “once I started playing it I realized I'd been waiting my entire life for something like it” (Delson, 1983, 67). She had played Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure, first on a teletype machine in the spare bedroom of her home, and later on a microcomputer. When she finished that, she played a few games on cassette -- Softape's Journey, Scott Adams' Adventureland -- but Williams felt she could do just as well at storytelling as the games she had played. So she sat down at her table, not just once but many times over, and she wrote and she sketched [11].We do not have many details on the initial design processes that brought Mystery House into being. Some of her later works, we know, were designed on the backs of unrolled wrapping paper, or handwritten on legal pads. The table would have been the most obvious surface in the Williams' home large enough to map on, and in most suburban tract houses, especially those of the California ranch style, layouts were such that kitchens gave the optimal domestic observation -- a mother could “work” in a kitchen and still observe the play of her children in another “room” of the home. When Roberta first played Colossal Cave, she admitted: “I just couldn't stop. It was compulsive. I started playing it and kept playing. I had a baby at the time, Chris was eight months old; I totally ignored him. I didn't want to be bothered. I didn't want to stop and make dinner” (Levy, 1984, 296). A baby can be ignored from within a spare bedroom, where she first played Colossal Cave; one can be a better mother from a kitchen table, even if what is “made” there may not be a meal. Thus, perhaps Roberta did not come to the table so much as the table came to her, as an object with agency within a broader condensation of domestic, architectural, and gendered expectations for behaviour and orientation.The table is a surface we consider, for its material and affective significance, and because: something happened there, in a setting that could have been nothing but utterly, exhaustingly familiar. Roberta Williams' “moment” of designing Mystery House is often historicized in such a way as to illustrate a fracture between the past and present of game history, between the smooth continuity of history, the “implicit density of the already-said” as Foucault (1972[1969], 142) articulates it, and what we retrospectively historicize to prove how, Foucault again, “consciousness awoke from its successive slumbers” (141). In this regard, Roberta Williams' gender and the domestic origin of her game production has often been told as the dramatic rupture categorizing the “epic moment” of Mystery House's design. Yet if we start with “the table” and not with “the game,” Mystery House is precisely the opposite of a “dramatic fracture” with the past. Rather, it is about what was most everyday for Roberta Williams, what was not simply a context but a material instantiation, her self's most intimate horizon of possibility and imagination: home.