How could you have left out Microsoft flight simulator. Flying over a few green lines (monochrome monitors FTW) that represented the ground while navigating via VOR. Good times.
@katbyter I forgot about that game. I didn’t play it back when it first came out but I have it on my current iPad (obviously I haven’t played in a while). Also had it when Nintendo first came out with their game boy and cartridges. I gave it to my youngest when he became interested in them. Just didn’t want to buy the newest version of game boy if he was going to break it. This and Sonic became his favorite games when he first started.
@haydesigner I still think it’s a good game. Crane made better games — certainly not Crane’s finest work, though. The man was a visionary, and everything he did pushed the limits of the available tech.
A Boy and His Blob, or the Game Boy sequel are really the full realization of his brilliance. You get the adventure of Pitfall! but you’re stuck in a much more intricate selection of puzzles where any move might screw up your next one.
Little Computer People was… mind-blowing. Like, the closest thing you could have to the Sims on a C64. Games at the time were about high scores or maybe actual winning conditions. LCP was just… here’s a house, here’s a dude who lives here, interact with the dude.
I don’t know what David Crane is doing these days, but he played a pivotal part in making video games more than just a gunship and a high score. Pitfall! is an important piece of this — 2600 games had no battery-powered RAM, no save states, so were very much ‘high score beaters’. Hell, you could get recognition from Activision from sending in Polaroids of your high scores in their games.
Pitfall! wasn’t anything like Zelda as far as being ‘beatable’. But it had a set goal, a time limit, and entirely predetermined level design — it’s not a random game. It’s simple by modern standards, but beating it in that 20 minute time limit? I think it holds up.
I’m enjoying this thread, so I’m going to expand on my vote. Hacker was largely a text adventure, though it had a lot of graphical elements. If memory serves, it didn’t come with instructions, per se. Instead, you loaded it up and were in a faux terminal, attempting to access whatever you were trying to hack into.
Failing the password check (obviously), you were given a test that only an insider should be able to pass — identify the parts of this robot. That sets the tone for the whole game. It was predicated on this idea that you were hacking into some system, and while it made doing so possible, it didn’t really give you any help in the process.
I haven’t played it recently; there’s a good chance it hasn’t held up at all. But at the time it felt oddly real. It didn’t try to fake realism beyond the capabilities of the 8-bit machine, rather it created a scenario based on interacting with an 8-bit machine.
@2many2no Perfect choices. Activision and Imagic made the best 2600 games, but hard to beat Yar’s Revenge as far as Atari titles. Maybe the Swordquests.
I remember using Apple II’s in elementary school but I don’t remember the names of games.
One was a game where you were a fish and you had to eat smaller fish. If you accidentally tried to eat a bigger one, it was game over.
There was also a math game, mostly addition and subtraction that flashed at the top of the screen and for every answer you got right, you made it to a goal at the bottom of the screen. I recall a lot of green colors on the screen.
I vaguely remember Lemonade Stand. I also recall playing a Carmen SanDiego game where you had three tries to find her.
@QuietDelusions@jerk_nugget Square One was great; I used to love watching that show. There were a lot of jokes in there that flew right over my head at the time, but I’ve watched a few bootleg episodes on YouTube as an adult and have been impressed with how good the show is and how on point some of the jokes/parodies/pastiches are. Some of the best are the music videos they did.
I’d definitely buy this if they ever release the complete show on DVD.
@cranky1950 No, but in this case it wasn’t a licensed playable version of the game depicted in the TV show, as shown in the clip @jerk_nugget posted (as an adult it’s obvious that was just a cartoon made to look like a game). The game on TV looked like it would be fun to play.
@jqubed yeah what a bummer! i would have liked to play mathman too, and it’s one my parents would have probably actually let me have. the closest i ever got to a video game system were these -
@jerk_nugget Ah, yes, I had a hockey game like that, and a Sesame Street calculator/counting thing (featuring Cookie Monster for some odd reason) that had a little game featuring Cookie Monster tossing a cookie back and forth from one hand to the other, and you had to hit the button for the correct hand at the right time to keep it going.
The only reason we wound up with a Game Boy was my aunt gave me one as a gift. Then my parents got more to stop the fighting between my siblings and me over whose turn it was to play on road trips.
@jerk_nugget Those Tiger hand-held games were literally all the same game just with slightly different backgrounds and graphics. Seems like they were expensive too…maybe we were just poor.
@medz that was the only one i ever had, and since my parents were anti-video game for whatever reason, it seems unlikely it was something they bought for me. must’ve been a gift? we weren’t dirt poor, but lower middle class. never wanted for anything, but money wasn’t thrown around either.
but yeah seeing all the others in hindsight, they definitely got their money’s worth out of that invention for sure.
@jqubed i remember my godmother had a gameboy (the OG gray ones with the green/gray screens) that played tetris. we hardly ever went to her house but when we did i got to play on it. as an adult i went on ebay and bought my own. to this day tetris is about the only video game i can play, haha.
I had a middle school French teacher who had programmed an educational game for the Apple II e. He had a dozen lining the back of the class so we could come and play. Got to visit his house in high school because his wife was the bio teacher. He remembered me and let me see the storage room he had. There had to be hundreds of them. He knew everything about those fossils, had learned everything, and refused to start over with more modern machines.
My favorite was typing in about 20 pages worth of codes on my Apple II e, just to get a stupid picture of a flower or a pixelated animal.( And that was only if you could find the 27 mistakes first) Most of the time you never got anything. I think some of them were actually the first ever examples if trolling! “Haha, I’ll make these idiots type in 20 pages of nothing because they think they’re going to end up with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge!”
I never had an Apple of any flavor (well, until I got a Macbook from work). My first machine was an S-100 buss based card cage (basically a Cromemco System 2). I also had an Atari 800 and an Atari 400 and a C-64 and a Cromemco C-10 and an IMSAI 8080. Still have all of them, except for the S-100 buss machine and the C-64. There were a bunch of other things in there, like a Timex Sinclair and a TI99-4A, tho I never really owned those, just sold them. I also vaguely recall things like Northstar and Ohio Scientific and other such things.
Interesting coincidence wrt this poll tho: last Sunday at World Maker Faire in New York, I met Richard Garriott (the guy who wrote the Ultima games). A friend from high school (who had a Northstar) was going around the Faire with Richard and stopped by the FIRST Robotics booth while I was doing my two-hour stint talking to people about FIRST.
@baqui63 We had a Cromemco at my high school. The model number “Z2D” popped into my head, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. It had BASIC, Fortran, and a chess game that displayed the board on a color TV while you entered moves on the terminal.
The computer sat in the math office. None of the teachers knew how to use it so they just let a few of us math kids play around and figure it out during lunch and after school. We could do stuff in BASIC when we could avoid the “Error 1 Syntax” message. (I thought “syntax” was a word they made up to sound computer-y. I mean what kind of word is “syntax”?) Fortran was a mystery. We only knew the interactive BASIC interpreter so no one could figure out the concept of writing a text file and compiling it. I still remember the day that I finally wrote a Fortran program to add two numbers. I brought the other kids in and showed them my achievement. I was as a god that day.
One day, because I do stupid shit like this, I decided to open up the terminal keyboard to see how it worked. Of course I dropped something and tore some wires off the printed circuit board. In a panic I brought it home and tried to solder them back on with my dad’s giant soldering gun. I got wires to stick to the board but after that all the keys typed the wrong characters. I think that computer never got used again. That was the year I graduated. The next year they had a computer lab consisting of Trash 80s.
@ssteve You (likely) recall correctly, as Cromemco had a line of computers named Z-2 including the Z-2D (dual 5-1/4" floppy drives) and the Z-2H (single 5-1/4" floppy and 11MB hard drive). In the early 1980s I worked for Digibyte Computer Systems in NYC (aka Computer Center and also Software City, the mail-order software business I ran for the company). We sold and I installed a number of Z-2H systems. Two that I recall fondly were on a drillship (oil well drilling ship) off the coast of Brazil in ~1982 and at the Blank Tapes Recording Studio. Some history on Blank Tapes is here. When talking about it, I mostly just say, “Where ‘Push, Push, In The Bush’ was recorded.”
@baqui63@snapster I still have the original pre-Origin Ultima in the ziploc package. I remember playing it through on my old ][Plus, though at the time I preferred Wizardry from SirTech.
When I lived in Las Vegas I used to be able to get into the CES shows; one year Lord British was there and set up a large barrier-square in front of their booth in the gaming area; every couple of hours Garriott and another fellow would come out in armor and give a pretty good swordfighting demonstration.
I thought I was cool because I had not just one, but 2 of the 5" floppy disk drives so I could set my monitor on top of them and I had different colored ink ribbons for my dot matrix printer so I could write papers with all red or all blue words. Man, I was so cool typing away in my florescent orange shirt with the white socks with florescent orange lines on them!!!
Ah, growing up right on the cusp of computers becoming mainstream was awesome. And I was a computer geek, even at that tender grade school age! Oregon Trail and Odell Lake, then all the “Munchers” games (Number Munchers, Word Munchers, and probably more.)
My favorite, though it came a little later, was The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary. It was a puzzle game, and young me felt -so- smart because the other kids would ask me for help.
The best game I played on Apple ][ systems was Rocky’s Boots. It was a game about logic circuit design.
Another one that we played a lot was a game about being a cross country truck driver.
Of the ones you listed…
Oregon Trail is one that we played at school a lot on Apple computers.
I enjoyed King’s quest, even though it’s a terrible, terrible game and the designer should feel bad about it, but on the PC instead.
Zork, you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Also, it is dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue. Also PC. I played a game called Starcross by the same dev on Atari.
Prince of Persia, also on PC instead.
Played California games, also on PC.
Lemonade stand was actually a game that I played on BBSes, not on the apple 2.
Ultima, on PC…
I didn’t play a whole lot on Apple products. I had Atari 8-bit computers at home instead.
Of all the games listed, I think the only ones I actually FINISHED were Oregon Trail, King’s Quest, and Prince of Persia.
One of my bosses had worked for Richard Garriott during the launch of Ultima Online (and several years before). Garriott had him pick a couple of players, and troll them hard. Kill them if he found them online, that sort of thing. Eventually the players gathered enough friends to trap my boss and kill him.
Boss said that Garriott saw how real online games would be to people long before anyone else did. He would tell his teams that people would form real friendships, and the folk they met online in games would be as real to them as anyone else. No one believed him, really.
My school had a computer lab, somehow. I’m still not sure who bought those machines, but it was great. We managed to get a cracked copy of Karateka that we played after hours. But my true love from those years is Zork. When I got a machine, a trash 80, I got the 3 Zork games shortly afterwards, and the sense of humor just clicked for me.
My elementary school had a couple versions of The Oregon Trail. The computer lab had the newer version where you could walk around the screen and aim to hunt, which I suspect was pretty advanced for the era. A few other Apple II’s scattered around the elementary school had an older version where hunting consisted of ten animals bounding across the screen and you had to hit the spacebar when they were in the middle in order to shoot them. The same system was also used to shoot bandits. I think the version where you hunt by waking around will always be the definitive version to me, but the versions for Windows in the '90s were also pretty good.
I bought The Oregon Trail card game. It was okay but mostly made me want to fire up an Apple II emulator and play the classic version.
My family had a Commodore 64 computer, for which we owned the game Lemonade (which, as I later learned, was a Lemonade Stand knockoff).
I preferred iced tea, so I went through the BASIC code and manually changed every instance of “lemonade” accordingly (and renamed the game “Iced Tea”).
While other seven-year-olds wasted their free time on that whole “outdoors” thing (perhaps attempting to somehow duplicate the games’ fantastical soft drink stations in real life), I had my priorities straight.
My first computer game was Adventure/Colossal Cave or whatever it was called. In the 1960’s.
Had a friend whose Dad worked for the the feds. It was in their mainframe. A CDC? Don’t remember. Dad would sneak his kid and a few friends in to play after hours sometimes. His boss knew and trusted us and was cool about it. Obviously, we were using very locked down guest logins.
I was in middle school?
One guy (legit employee, Fortran coder) deliberately played it without a terminal, using a local dot matrix printout. He showed us a printout result of a move once. I think he submitted moves on Hollerith cards? For the hell if it?
It got an early start in the olden days, when Unix arrived on reel-to-reel tapes, and ran on (mostly) PDP-11s. The game was actually written on a DEC 10 (I really MISS Digital Equipment Corporation), aka PDP-10 (a mainframe, as opposed to the 11s, which were referred to as “micro-computers”).
Woof Take a look at the image of the Arpanet, from the dawn of time, and all those PDP-10s. Dang (aka Shrdlu is O.L.D.) [Image not displayed on purpose. Click on the link for full size, plz.]
Ok, obviously, my memory on this is for the dustbin.
No shock there. ; ).
(For better and for worse)
But I am certain of some things. These informal visits to a fed computer happened in the mid-late 1960’s. During my public school years. They were not frequent. Perhaps once a year or less. For an hour or so apiece I think? We would just get a taste.
The Fed agency area in which I visited had some terminals. We thought those were beyond cool. We played using a terminal. We argued over who got the terminal access. I don’t think the user account (the dad did the logging in) had privileges. We were told it didn’t. But we were into the game, not the machine or the OS during those visits. I don’t recall “trying anything funny”. I prob did not know what an OS was then.
This was definitely during my school years. As in, no driver’s license. And aside from a few chance “how are you doing?” street encounters, I have not had any conversations with either the dad or that classmate since I left the local school system.
I don’t think I cared or was much aware if the difference In various mainframes then anyway. The “cool stuff” I was personally rabid about then involved different areas.
I remember that when my older brother was a freshman in college, one of his friends took a term off school and worked seasonal temp for a fed agency. I was still in HS. I told him (brother’s friend) about this game I had played a few times on a fed machine. He later (during his few months of employment) told me that this game was also on his work mainframe and that he played it once in a while when he thought he could. Whatever game it was. (I got the clear impression that he and and the other temp seasonal co-workers were stoned non-stop while at work. So who knows what they actually did.)
What game was it? Yesterday, I thought it was Colossal Cave.
Bad brain! Bad brain!
I can easily believe that the memory of what machine I got near then got all blurred. I didn’t really start to care until the late 70’s, when I got more access to mainframes. And I can’t even remember what mainframe I was using in grad school when I wrote and compiled code on it. (Never bothered with games then.) I just didn’t care at that time. My thoughts were elsewhere.
Back in the 1960’s, among my acquaintances, only people who were involved with a university, the govt, or certain kind of businesses and institutions ever personally got near computers (that I remember hearing about, anyway).
My dad swore at them a lot. Because he dealt daily with the airlines.
My mom deliberately sent in bill payments after putting staples into the punch cards, if she had issues, or disliked the company practices.
The game I played a few times during my public school years on this fed machine was a text based game played on a local mainframe.
And it had to be at least somewhat superficially similar to Colossal Cave. Perhaps in my mind/memory I managed to concatenate and mashup this this game (whatever it was) of my teenage years with a version of Colossal Cave I encountered later?
This is the possible or likely explanation. I was deliberately involved, back then, with various leisure and experimental practices that could easily mess with my memory. And there were personal issues - anxiety along others, tho I didn’t know I had anxiety then - which also mess with memory. And my memory has, for at least the last few decades, been either very very good (to there degree of being able to recount entire conversations and have other people who heard the conversations agree I just about had it) or a bit quirky and questionable anyway, depending in the topic.
And I’m not young.
The spread of areas in which I now find my memory to be kinda speculative astonishes me now. I used to be better. I think I can tell which memories I can count on and which ones not? But can I? Who knows? The brain is a funny thing. And it’s not like there is usually a way to check.
These memory detail fading that I started to notice more in the last 15 years or so (detail blurring and less ability to sharply recall many events that barely mattered to me at all, and some inability to recall sharp details of events that did and do matter to me) - - this experience of the odd loss of detail and of events used to disturb me.
Now my reaction is more usually to be amused at my own mentally frailty.
If I get (or already have) Alzheimer’s, or the rough equivalent thru TIA’s or other causes (brain degeneration based on a history of some head injuries from long ago, or whatever), will I be able to enjoy and ponder watching the mental loses happen, by living thru the happening of them, from some intellectual perspective or other, the capacity for which I manage to retain?
Will I know that I don’t know what I once knew? Can I, being that way, find some sort of human value in that human experience, if there is no remedy? Hope so.
Will I, in that future, possibly being in that deteriorated state, be within a dream of life that has its intellectual and personal and honorable compensations in some manner? Hope so.
Two decades ago I could easily recall in detail many events from childhood and young adulthood. Now I often need a trigger to bring them forth, unless they were a big deal to me. And accuracy? I try for it. I am certain - or have deluded myself that “I am certain” - about some things that matter to me. But am I certain?
Live and unlearn?
I did encounter a version of Colossal Cave in grad school but did not play it, to my memory. No time for that. Lab access was a pain and not my focus.
I did encounter the game ported to some version of PCDOS. And later, I think, to android.
When I played it thru, a bit, on the PC, I could have sworn it was an old familiar from my teen years.
I now wonder what game I actually did play in that Fed office I had no business being in, all those years ago.
@f00l@Shrdlu Colossal Cave or close variants of it were ported to a lot of systems. I know it was at my hometown university in 1978, when I was in high school because we had a couple of terminal links to the university system and the seniors who had access were all over the game (and showing us lowly underclassfolks what we couldn’t play). That system was a CDC Cyber 70 Model 73, running the Kronos operating system. If they had been on a DECsystem (or VAX) I’d have remembered; we had relatives working for DEC in Colorado who used to give me all kinds of cool documentation and sales stuff, so I was enamored of it.
A few years later when I went to that university I was able to dump the FORTRAN code and the data files; the conversion dates in the comments all showed 1976-1978 original and modifications/ports.
Something about using a room-filling mainframe computer with washing-machine size disk drives and a dual-round green screen console with its own PPU just to play a simple game… such a feeling!
The way Wikipedia does those in-article file links: do they do that on purpose, because they don’t want images embedded elsewhere by linking directly from the article (as opposed to the image location)?
Any idea?
I suppose i could Google this.
Sigh. I’m a lazy bum today. Asking other people to do stuff I should be doing for me. Apologies. ; )
I miss Infocom (makers of the Zork series, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Planetfall, and many others) so much — such a great company with an absurdly wonderful sense of humor; I’d give anything to have all the stuff that came in the Infocom boxes (the “Feelies”), as well as all my old copies of The New Zork Times.
@kevincoleman Do you remember when they were forced to change the name of the newsletter by the new york times? Apparently new yorkers couldn’t tell the difference between the few page long New Zork Times and the quite large newsrag of record…
I “programmed” (copied a BASIC game from a book) a game called “Egg Drop” where a zero character came from a random spot at the top of the screen and you had to catch it in a \ _ / at the bottom. The commercial games I played most were Q*Bert, Number Munchers, and Oregon Trail
I enjoyed a lot of the classic Apple II educational games, like Oregon Trail, and the MECC titles.
I did want to mention that if you have any Apple II software/disks, you should definitely get in touch with Jason Scott about getting them preserved: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5180
Especially if you have educational, office, or other non-gaming software, it’s possible that no one has made a copy of it.
My only exposure to the Apple // was at school, so I have to default to Oregon Trail. We had a Commodore 128, though, and I played a hell of a lot of Dig Dug on it.
In first grade, I think, the only thing I wanted to do was shoot squirrels in Oregon Trail on the classroom computer. I mean, once the buffalo (or was it deer?) were gone, presumably extinct from overhunting. As far as I was concerned, that game was a lot of wrapping paper around a bullets exchange, and then the shooting. Blankets and food? How important can blankets possibly be, and food… we’ll have plenty of food, because of, the animals.
Didn’t discover Infocom games until (probably?) long after they were out of business, with the games themselves running on emulators. I must have still been pretty young though, because I don’t remember, at least initially, making much of an attempt to solve them without cheating. So simple minded: having a computer display text saying that I had acquired… whatever treasures (an egg?), felt like achievement, or maybe wealth.
Had no idea that Castle Wolfenstein and Prince of Persia were conceived of that early on. Now I’m curious…
@InnocuousFarmer The first two Wolfenstein games were 2D, and they weren’t all that great if memory serves. In one of them you were basically pulling off Operation Valkyrie, don’t remember what the point of the other one was. Wolfenstein 3D was inspired by these games, but none of the same devs, etc. worked on it - the company that made the first two was long out of business & the trademark up for grabs.
@mamajoan That was another one of my favorites! I don’t know how it is, but there is a Lode Runner Classic game in the iTunes store. Lode Runner Classic Site
@Josephus Unless there’s some non-ID/Apogee title named Commander Keen, I think you’re in the wrong era- they were DOS games only.
A fantastic game for sure.
@dashcloud oh, I just ignored the Apple-centric nature of the discussion. An era is a time period, after all, and I think Keen was in the right time-frame.
@dashcloud@Josephus It’s a weird conundrum; I too would think of Commander Keen as being in the PC-DOS era, which (to me) is past the Apple II era. I think of the Apple II in the same breath as the C64, the Atari 800, the TI99/4A… but they were still being made just months before Doom came out.
I do think of Commander Keen as being beyond the capabilities of an Apple II and therefore ‘beyond the era’, but realistically that was one heck of an era.
@Kawa Huge roguelike fan here… all of my friends decided to do favorite video game characters for halloween one year, and I just had a big pixelated ‘@’ printed up on a tank top. I think people just thought I was like… lazy Twitter or something, but I got a kick out of it.
@brhfl Ooh! Always exciting to find another roguelike fan in the wild. Which one’s your favorite?
Hahaha I love the idea of an @ sign costume! A gray @ on a black background is my avatar on most sites nowadays. My partner actually got me these @ earrings on my birthday this year:
My favorite for the past few years has probably been Brogue. It’s definitely very streamlined compared to Nethack/Slash’em, which is appealing when my brain is feeling blah. The aesthetic is wonderful for a game that’s still text- and not tile-based.
As for the more traditional route, I used to be in the Slash’em camp, but stick to Nethack these days. Couldn’t really say why. I often play on the alternet server.
Semi-related, just recently got a copy of Cave Noire for Game Boy, and it’s really a fun little dungeon-crawler.
@brhfl@Kawa If you’d like, you can play lots of the early Rogue like (including Rogue itself) games on the Internet Archive (the MS-DOS versions for sure, likely the Apple II ones as well).
@brhfl@dashcloud I know much more about the roguelikes still in semi-active development than getting one’s hands on relics. There are actually too many to list here, for all sorts of platforms. (I personally love Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup in the free/open source for PC domain; for paid roguelikes, Dungeonmans is probably my favorite; for Android, Shattered Pixel Dungeon is fabulous.)
I will say, Rogue, despite being the namebearer, is not the first game that had randomly generated dungeons on a PC - that actually goes to Beneath Apple Manor, which is also in Internet Archive.
@Kawa Brogue really is probably the most recent one I know (maybe Pathos on iOS), so it’s good to hear other modern recommendations. I need to get into DCSS, it’s on my machine, I just haven’t taken the time to soak it in yet…
@brhfl Like Nethack, you can play DCSS over server - crawl.develz.org will give you a good and intuitive list. You can even play in browser connected to a server!
Other mostly-active free/open source roguelikes nowadays: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, UnReal World, Tales of Maj’Eyal. I don’t know if Infra Arcana is still in development but it’s lovely too.
Paid roguelikes worth investigating: HyperRogue (also has a free version but I think the paid one is getting all the updates; also available on Android but a bit clunky), Caves of Qud (very actively updated), Sproggiwood (stunning, available on mobile and not clunky at all), Ancient Domains of Mystery (again, also a free version but the paid one gets the updates)
And that’s before the wave of procedural content in other indie genres came through. If you like platformers (I don’t), Spelunky is the first and still probably the best in that combo; FTL Faster than Light (sci-fi ship battles) and Crypt of the NecroDancer (rhythm game, but with a no-rhythm-required basic roguelike mode) are my personal favorites. I’ve also heard good things about Superhot (bullet time first person shooter) but don’t have personal experience with it.
@Kawa@dashcloud@brhfl Was just closing some old tabs – how’d I miss this thread? I love roguelikes. Used to play Moria on a Palm OS thing. Got farthest, I think, with a Dwarf Priest. Sunk lots of hours into Angband, mostly vanilla. Have been playing Nethack a little here and there over the past few months, too; that and the “recent” game Dungeons of Dredmor, which is geared to be “accessible”, but makes me mildly frustrated with its controls.
I keep intending to get into Brogue, ADOM, DCSS, a few Angband variants, maybe even ToME… these things are time sinks, though.
Honorable mention to FTL and Risk of Rain, which I’ve dumped way too many hours into, but those are definitely not roguelikes. They’re pretty roguelike-like for not being roguelikes though. More than most of the rest of the games that get that label, I think.
although i am of age for oregon trail, not only did we not play it in school but i’d never even heard of it until years later when people started making ‘dying of dysentery’ jokes on the internet.
the only things i remember about computers in school are as follows:
moving from ALAP in elementary school to EOP in junior high and choosing ‘computers’ for my focus in that period. the EOP ‘room’ was literally a closet, with one computer in the corner on an a table no bigger than the computer itself, and a wooden chair like what you would find at someone’s kitchen table. it was there that i ‘coded’ some kind of quiz game on a floppy disk. (the ones that were actually floppy.) don’t remember a thing about it otherwise, including what type of computer it was.
in junior high taking some kind of job placement/personality test and it spitting out results informing me my most likely career was “logger.” i recall several other kids getting this same bewildering result. we didn’t have a clue what logging was.
‘keyboarding’ aka what typing class was now called once computers became available.
@f00l they were some kind of advanced placement groups for kids. in elementary school, being in ALAP (accelerated learning activities program) meant about five of us were bussed off to another school to do projects with a couple of other small groups of kids. i’m not sure anymore how often it happened. not every day or even every week. we also sometimes went just to another room in the school to do schoolwork that i guess was ahead of what the other kids in our class were doing. i also went to a different classroom for a few years each time we did reading to sit with a more advanced class. (i never liked that bit though because i thought the teacher was really mean. i wonder if she really was or not. maybe she just had a loud voice and took no shit.) http://warwickalap.org/faq.html
despite being an HSP (highly sensitive person, which i have learned is actually A Thing) i was pretty unfazed by it all, never felt ‘othered’ or weird about it. i’m pretty laid back and take most things in stride, then and now. come to think of it, i probably liked it because i was around kids in small groups (way less overwhelming than whole classrooms) and they were like me - they wanted to learn and do the work, they didn’t want to mess around or act up. it likely gave me a much needed break from all the stimuli of ‘regular’ class.
in fifth and sixth grade, i also was a “reading buddy” where you would go and sit with younger kids in their classrooms and help them with their schoolwork and read to/with them. i remember no one wanted the reading buddy i got, i think she was on the fringe of special needs. i think that’s why they assigned me to her. she was a sweetheart. her name was mabel. i had her younger sister the next year. they were both great kids.
i even used to fill in for the secretary at lunch time. instead of sitting with other kids in the cafeteria & then going out for recess, i ate in her office at her desk and answered the phone, put flyers in the mailboxes, etc. in hindsight i think it would be awfully funny to go into a school’s main office and find a ten year old running the place, but there i was.
EOP was what they called it when we moved on to junior high (7th & 8th grade) except it was more focused, and took place at the school and occupied a regular period of your schedule. i definitely remember ‘choosing’ computers but i couldn’t tell you what EOP stands for or anything more about it! junior high happened so fast it all seems like a foggy dream.
Well, I just learned a bunch of what happened in the school systems after my time. So thanks.
One curious small difference over time: When I was in elementary school, we all used cartridge fountain pens. You took them apart and screwed in a new cartridge when the liquid ink ran out. They could explode or leak. The ink took time to dry and could be smeared around. If the papers got damp or wet, the ink ran on the page.
My 5-years-younger brother started writing in ink with ball point pens. Or so he remembers.
When I showed him a pic of the kind of fountain pens we used, he denies remembering ever using one.
When we started using ink pens in school (third grade?), I think they were similar to these:
This vid is not identical to what I used, since the ones I used had a clear plastic container for the cartridge, so that you could see when it was getting empty.
This one in the vid is also prob a bit nicer than the one I used.
Did writing with them make that pen-on-paper sound, always? My memory is blowing up on me here.
Perhaps I should get a nice pen. If I had a pen I kinda treasured, perhaps I would take the effort to make my current handwriting look like something other that randomized marks indicating various expressions of physical pain.
Wow. just googled “bad handwriting” and looked at images.
My handwriting is worse than what I’m seeing in Google images, excepting the examples that look super-rounded and written by the very young.
My handwriting used to be decent-to-attractive, and legible.
Now it’s worse than this:
I think I’ve just completely forfeited the hand-muscle strength and stamina, and fine motor control, by acts of total neglect and disuse.
years later my parents did get their first computer - a gateway - which i pressured them to choose because i liked the cow. and when you went to the store they had free black & white cookies and lemonade. and a big dark room to watch movies in. (i believe i first wanted an apple because it had a rainbow logo, and my friend had one, but that idea was shut down for some reason.) anyway, i recall the PC had a ‘suite’ of puzzle games. my favorite was fringer - idk if anyone remembers this game but it was a bunch of knotted hanging ropes you hand to untangle before moving to the next level.
second to that was jewel chase. missed dinner a couple of times because i was so addicted, and my mom got tired of calling me up from the basement and thought it would teach me a lesson.
@mlhobby happy to help! honestly you’re the only other person i’ve ever come across who remembers it lol! if it weren’t for google i’d have thought i dreamt it by now.
I was a kid in the eighties but I went to a crap-ass middle school that had one computer per 120 students instead of consolidating all those computers into a lab. Hence, the popular kids played plenty of educational Apple II games, and I got to sit around twiddling my thumbs until I could go home and play WordZap, Digger, and Harlem Adventure on the PC.
@number51 Oh lord, there’s no way I’m going to search for it from work. It was a freeware text adventure that came on a 5.25" floppy of games that one of my dad’s coworkers gave us. I played it because it was the only thing we had; the computer wasn’t a toy, so no money was spent to make it into one.
The game took place in a grim 1970’s version of NYC, and I’m sure it was racist. I never got past the getting-eaten-by-mangy-dogs phase, so I don’t even think I encountered any human NPCs. I guess I brought it up as a snide example of the anti-educational crap I was exposed to around the same time my school was letting the bullies monopolize Carmen Sandiego.
I didn’t have an Apple 2 and the only game my friend had for his was The Bilestoad. Wikipedia describes it well: “In The Bilestoad, players control “meatlings” that hack and battle with axes and shields from a top-view perspective.”
I loved playing “Dr. J vs. Larry Bird” on the TRS-80s we had in high school.
Does anyone remember “Ultimate Reality” for the Atari computers? (I had the Atari 800, AND A CASSETTE DRIVE.) I really enjoyed that game, but also loved the music of it, too. Can’t seem to find a thing about it anywhere online though…
We teach the classics up in this house. I’ve got an Atari 2600 connected to a curved 55" 4K Samsung and an Apple IIe (Platinum bitches!) with a Dell 20" flat panel. If my 9 year old does well with the Infocom text adventures we let her have some fancy graphics!
All this game nostalgia! Maybe this is the right place to ask a question…
I played a game on a friend’s C64 at a party easily 30 years ago now. It was a hotseat 4-player multiplayer space strategy game I believe. All I remember about it is that you’d build a fleet, send it to one of your opponents planets, and do battle.
It was a crap-ton of fun! I never saw it again after that party and can’t remember the name. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
@brhfl Ooh. The description of the game sounds close. It has far fancier graphics than I recall. I think the game was just a simple grid on a white background.
Still it looks like this was inspired from the game I remember and gets good reviews. Might have to find an emulator and give it a try. Thanks for the tip!
I have a shocking confession, I never played games on my C64. I just usta bullshit around on BBSs and do my homework. Had a 300 baud modem and could log onto school mainframe from 11pm till 4 am. No standing in line for me. do my programming assignments send them to the printer and pick them up on the way to class in the afternoon.
Never had the Apple or Amiga that I wanted, but I played the hell out of a game I think was called Ghana Bwana on the TRS-80. In my head it seems like it was a Pitfall clone. All my Apple games were played at school, and the vast majority of that was Oregon Trail.
Got a lot more experience in the DOS game world but as @jqubed said, that’s another show. I’ll save those tales for when that topic comes up.
I can’t believe you forgot Leather Goddesses of Phobos.
How could you have left out Microsoft flight simulator. Flying over a few green lines (monochrome monitors FTW) that represented the ground while navigating via VOR. Good times.
@squishybrain And over Meigs Field, since destroyed by dirtbag Daley.
@squishybrain That game was popular with a bunch of relatives who had, or wanted to have, a small plane pilot license.
Mary has died of dysentery.
@jzmacdaddy
/image died of dissing Terry
@jzmacdaddy used to play that game at 4 years old
Pitfall
@katbyter I forgot about that game. I didn’t play it back when it first came out but I have it on my current iPad (obviously I haven’t played in a while). Also had it when Nintendo first came out with their game boy and cartridges. I gave it to my youngest when he became interested in them. Just didn’t want to buy the newest version of game boy if he was going to break it. This and Sonic became his favorite games when he first started.
Try playing it now, @katbyter… it’s boring as hell.
@haydesigner I still think it’s a good game. Crane made better games — certainly not Crane’s finest work, though. The man was a visionary, and everything he did pushed the limits of the available tech.
A Boy and His Blob, or the Game Boy sequel are really the full realization of his brilliance. You get the adventure of Pitfall! but you’re stuck in a much more intricate selection of puzzles where any move might screw up your next one.
Little Computer People was… mind-blowing. Like, the closest thing you could have to the Sims on a C64. Games at the time were about high scores or maybe actual winning conditions. LCP was just… here’s a house, here’s a dude who lives here, interact with the dude.
I don’t know what David Crane is doing these days, but he played a pivotal part in making video games more than just a gunship and a high score. Pitfall! is an important piece of this — 2600 games had no battery-powered RAM, no save states, so were very much ‘high score beaters’. Hell, you could get recognition from Activision from sending in Polaroids of your high scores in their games.
Pitfall! wasn’t anything like Zelda as far as being ‘beatable’. But it had a set goal, a time limit, and entirely predetermined level design — it’s not a random game. It’s simple by modern standards, but beating it in that 20 minute time limit? I think it holds up.
Hacker.
I’m enjoying this thread, so I’m going to expand on my vote. Hacker was largely a text adventure, though it had a lot of graphical elements. If memory serves, it didn’t come with instructions, per se. Instead, you loaded it up and were in a faux terminal, attempting to access whatever you were trying to hack into.
Failing the password check (obviously), you were given a test that only an insider should be able to pass — identify the parts of this robot. That sets the tone for the whole game. It was predicated on this idea that you were hacking into some system, and while it made doing so possible, it didn’t really give you any help in the process.
I haven’t played it recently; there’s a good chance it hasn’t held up at all. But at the time it felt oddly real. It didn’t try to fake realism beyond the capabilities of the 8-bit machine, rather it created a scenario based on interacting with an 8-bit machine.
@brhfl You might be interested in Cosmoserve, which used a similar idea if I remember correctly: https://archive.org/details/agt_cosmos97
@dashcloud Thanks, I’ll check that out!
Only had a 2600 then a NES.
So, Yar’s Revenge and Legend of Zelda.
@2many2no Perfect choices. Activision and Imagic made the best 2600 games, but hard to beat Yar’s Revenge as far as Atari titles. Maybe the Swordquests.
You wake up. The room is spinning very gently above your head.
@mci …is that Hitchhiker’s Guide? So many goddamn fish down the drain…
@mci @QuietDelusions
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition
@mci I loved this game, I remember playing in high school before I ever read the books
@mci Save that pocket lint, man!
@скряга Useless info !! did not play and do not want
@EvaSooL what is the deal with these spamless spam posts @tHumperchick?
I remember using Apple II’s in elementary school but I don’t remember the names of games.
One was a game where you were a fish and you had to eat smaller fish. If you accidentally tried to eat a bigger one, it was game over.
There was also a math game, mostly addition and subtraction that flashed at the top of the screen and for every answer you got right, you made it to a goal at the bottom of the screen. I recall a lot of green colors on the screen.
I vaguely remember Lemonade Stand. I also recall playing a Carmen SanDiego game where you had three tries to find her.
@JT954 Odell Lake is the fish game you’re thinking of, I think. I loved that game so much!
@QuietDelusions That’s it. Odell Lake.
I just found out what the other game is: Number Munchers.
@JT954 Two of my favorites when I was a kid!
@JT954 Yup, I remember Number Munchers.
@jqubed I knew it was number munchers as soon as you said it. That game was amazing.
@JT954 i never played that but it just brought back fond memories of one of my favorite shows: mathnet.
and in between you’d have mathman. since i was never allowed video games, i had no clue it was a play on pacman, but i loved it all the same.
@jerk_nugget Was that on Square One?? Talk about bringing up something I haven’t thought about in a long time…
@QuietDelusions yup!
@jerk_nugget I think I convinced my parents to get me a game called Mathman but was pretty bitterly disappointed that it wasn’t like what was on TV.
@jqubed 8 bit graphics just never lived up to the cover art.
@QuietDelusions @jerk_nugget Square One was great; I used to love watching that show. There were a lot of jokes in there that flew right over my head at the time, but I’ve watched a few bootleg episodes on YouTube as an adult and have been impressed with how good the show is and how on point some of the jokes/parodies/pastiches are. Some of the best are the music videos they did.
I’d definitely buy this if they ever release the complete show on DVD.
@cranky1950 No, but in this case it wasn’t a licensed playable version of the game depicted in the TV show, as shown in the clip @jerk_nugget posted (as an adult it’s obvious that was just a cartoon made to look like a game). The game on TV looked like it would be fun to play.
Here’s another music video from Square One:
@jqubed yeah what a bummer! i would have liked to play mathman too, and it’s one my parents would have probably actually let me have. the closest i ever got to a video game system were these -
@jerk_nugget Ah, yes, I had a hockey game like that, and a Sesame Street calculator/counting thing (featuring Cookie Monster for some odd reason) that had a little game featuring Cookie Monster tossing a cookie back and forth from one hand to the other, and you had to hit the button for the correct hand at the right time to keep it going.
The only reason we wound up with a Game Boy was my aunt gave me one as a gift. Then my parents got more to stop the fighting between my siblings and me over whose turn it was to play on road trips.
@jerk_nugget Those Tiger hand-held games were literally all the same game just with slightly different backgrounds and graphics. Seems like they were expensive too…maybe we were just poor.
@medz that was the only one i ever had, and since my parents were anti-video game for whatever reason, it seems unlikely it was something they bought for me. must’ve been a gift? we weren’t dirt poor, but lower middle class. never wanted for anything, but money wasn’t thrown around either.
but yeah seeing all the others in hindsight, they definitely got their money’s worth out of that invention for sure.
@jqubed i remember my godmother had a gameboy (the OG gray ones with the green/gray screens) that played tetris. we hardly ever went to her house but when we did i got to play on it. as an adult i went on ebay and bought my own. to this day tetris is about the only video game i can play, haha.
Pong
I had a middle school French teacher who had programmed an educational game for the Apple II e. He had a dozen lining the back of the class so we could come and play. Got to visit his house in high school because his wife was the bio teacher. He remembered me and let me see the storage room he had. There had to be hundreds of them. He knew everything about those fossils, had learned everything, and refused to start over with more modern machines.
My favorite was typing in about 20 pages worth of codes on my Apple II e, just to get a stupid picture of a flower or a pixelated animal.( And that was only if you could find the 27 mistakes first) Most of the time you never got anything. I think some of them were actually the first ever examples if trolling! “Haha, I’ll make these idiots type in 20 pages of nothing because they think they’re going to end up with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge!”
Odell lake
Telex terminal emulator.
I answered Zork.
I never had an Apple of any flavor (well, until I got a Macbook from work). My first machine was an S-100 buss based card cage (basically a Cromemco System 2). I also had an Atari 800 and an Atari 400 and a C-64 and a Cromemco C-10 and an IMSAI 8080. Still have all of them, except for the S-100 buss machine and the C-64. There were a bunch of other things in there, like a Timex Sinclair and a TI99-4A, tho I never really owned those, just sold them. I also vaguely recall things like Northstar and Ohio Scientific and other such things.
Interesting coincidence wrt this poll tho: last Sunday at World Maker Faire in New York, I met Richard Garriott (the guy who wrote the Ultima games). A friend from high school (who had a Northstar) was going around the Faire with Richard and stopped by the FIRST Robotics booth while I was doing my two-hour stint talking to people about FIRST.
@baqui63 I answered Ultima and was happy to read of your coincidence. I follow Lord British on Twitter out of nostalgia.
@baqui63 We had a Cromemco at my high school. The model number “Z2D” popped into my head, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. It had BASIC, Fortran, and a chess game that displayed the board on a color TV while you entered moves on the terminal.
The computer sat in the math office. None of the teachers knew how to use it so they just let a few of us math kids play around and figure it out during lunch and after school. We could do stuff in BASIC when we could avoid the “Error 1 Syntax” message. (I thought “syntax” was a word they made up to sound computer-y. I mean what kind of word is “syntax”?) Fortran was a mystery. We only knew the interactive BASIC interpreter so no one could figure out the concept of writing a text file and compiling it. I still remember the day that I finally wrote a Fortran program to add two numbers. I brought the other kids in and showed them my achievement. I was as a god that day.
One day, because I do stupid shit like this, I decided to open up the terminal keyboard to see how it worked. Of course I dropped something and tore some wires off the printed circuit board. In a panic I brought it home and tried to solder them back on with my dad’s giant soldering gun. I got wires to stick to the board but after that all the keys typed the wrong characters. I think that computer never got used again. That was the year I graduated. The next year they had a computer lab consisting of Trash 80s.
@snapster Awesome
@snapster cool.
@ssteve You (likely) recall correctly, as Cromemco had a line of computers named Z-2 including the Z-2D (dual 5-1/4" floppy drives) and the Z-2H (single 5-1/4" floppy and 11MB hard drive). In the early 1980s I worked for Digibyte Computer Systems in NYC (aka Computer Center and also Software City, the mail-order software business I ran for the company). We sold and I installed a number of Z-2H systems. Two that I recall fondly were on a drillship (oil well drilling ship) off the coast of Brazil in ~1982 and at the Blank Tapes Recording Studio. Some history on Blank Tapes is here. When talking about it, I mostly just say, “Where ‘Push, Push, In The Bush’ was recorded.”
@baqui63 @snapster I still have the original pre-Origin Ultima in the ziploc package. I remember playing it through on my old ][Plus, though at the time I preferred Wizardry from SirTech.
When I lived in Las Vegas I used to be able to get into the CES shows; one year Lord British was there and set up a large barrier-square in front of their booth in the gaming area; every couple of hours Garriott and another fellow would come out in armor and give a pretty good swordfighting demonstration.
@baqui63 I love this goofy song about Zork
Just gonna leave this here…
http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fif-archive%2Fgames%2Fzcode%2Fzdungeon.z5
@thismyusername lololol
I thought I was cool because I had not just one, but 2 of the 5" floppy disk drives so I could set my monitor on top of them and I had different colored ink ribbons for my dot matrix printer so I could write papers with all red or all blue words. Man, I was so cool typing away in my florescent orange shirt with the white socks with florescent orange lines on them!!!
Ah, growing up right on the cusp of computers becoming mainstream was awesome. And I was a computer geek, even at that tender grade school age! Oregon Trail and Odell Lake, then all the “Munchers” games (Number Munchers, Word Munchers, and probably more.)
My favorite, though it came a little later, was The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary. It was a puzzle game, and young me felt -so- smart because the other kids would ask me for help.
/giphy total nerd
The best game I played on Apple ][ systems was Rocky’s Boots. It was a game about logic circuit design.
Another one that we played a lot was a game about being a cross country truck driver.
Of the ones you listed…
I didn’t play a whole lot on Apple products. I had Atari 8-bit computers at home instead.
Of all the games listed, I think the only ones I actually FINISHED were Oregon Trail, King’s Quest, and Prince of Persia.
@kazriko
/image cross country usa
Edit: more like this one
@medz Yeah, the bottom one looks like the one we had.
I got bored with Pong. Then I got bored with Space Invaders. I gave up on video games after that.
One of my bosses had worked for Richard Garriott during the launch of Ultima Online (and several years before). Garriott had him pick a couple of players, and troll them hard. Kill them if he found them online, that sort of thing. Eventually the players gathered enough friends to trap my boss and kill him.
Boss said that Garriott saw how real online games would be to people long before anyone else did. He would tell his teams that people would form real friendships, and the folk they met online in games would be as real to them as anyone else. No one believed him, really.
My school had a computer lab, somehow. I’m still not sure who bought those machines, but it was great. We managed to get a cracked copy of Karateka that we played after hours. But my true love from those years is Zork. When I got a machine, a trash 80, I got the 3 Zork games shortly afterwards, and the sense of humor just clicked for me.
@BethanyAnne Best part of this thread is the reminder of games long forgotten. Karateka was a favorite for quite a while.
The only reason I know of Zork is because it was mentioned in The Big Bang Theory.
@JT954 Zimbabwe
I only remember Oregon trail.
Drol
https://g.co/kgs/smyVVY
My elementary school had a couple versions of The Oregon Trail. The computer lab had the newer version where you could walk around the screen and aim to hunt, which I suspect was pretty advanced for the era. A few other Apple II’s scattered around the elementary school had an older version where hunting consisted of ten animals bounding across the screen and you had to hit the spacebar when they were in the middle in order to shoot them. The same system was also used to shoot bandits. I think the version where you hunt by waking around will always be the definitive version to me, but the versions for Windows in the '90s were also pretty good.
I bought The Oregon Trail card game. It was okay but mostly made me want to fire up an Apple II emulator and play the classic version.
My family had a Commodore 64 computer, for which we owned the game Lemonade (which, as I later learned, was a Lemonade Stand knockoff).
I preferred iced tea, so I went through the BASIC code and manually changed every instance of “lemonade” accordingly (and renamed the game “Iced Tea”).
While other seven-year-olds wasted their free time on that whole “outdoors” thing (perhaps attempting to somehow duplicate the games’ fantastical soft drink stations in real life), I had my priorities straight.
Is this the era of Leisure Suit Larry?
My first computer game was Adventure/Colossal Cave or whatever it was called. In the 1960’s.
Had a friend whose Dad worked for the the feds. It was in their mainframe. A CDC? Don’t remember. Dad would sneak his kid and a few friends in to play after hours sometimes. His boss knew and trusted us and was cool about it. Obviously, we were using very locked down guest logins.
I was in middle school?
One guy (legit employee, Fortran coder) deliberately played it without a terminal, using a local dot matrix printout. He showed us a printout result of a move once. I think he submitted moves on Hollerith cards? For the hell if it?
Still fond of that game.
@f00l I have to call you on this one, kiddo. Your memory is a bit off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
It got an early start in the olden days, when Unix arrived on reel-to-reel tapes, and ran on (mostly) PDP-11s. The game was actually written on a DEC 10 (I really MISS Digital Equipment Corporation), aka PDP-10 (a mainframe, as opposed to the 11s, which were referred to as “micro-computers”).
Woof Take a look at the image of the Arpanet, from the dawn of time, and all those PDP-10s. Dang (aka Shrdlu is O.L.D.) [Image not displayed on purpose. Click on the link for full size, plz.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10#/media/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_march_1977_PDP-10.png
@Shrdlu
Ok, obviously, my memory on this is for the dustbin.
No shock there. ; ).
(For better and for worse)
But I am certain of some things. These informal visits to a fed computer happened in the mid-late 1960’s. During my public school years. They were not frequent. Perhaps once a year or less. For an hour or so apiece I think? We would just get a taste.
The Fed agency area in which I visited had some terminals. We thought those were beyond cool. We played using a terminal. We argued over who got the terminal access. I don’t think the user account (the dad did the logging in) had privileges. We were told it didn’t. But we were into the game, not the machine or the OS during those visits. I don’t recall “trying anything funny”. I prob did not know what an OS was then.
This was definitely during my school years. As in, no driver’s license. And aside from a few chance “how are you doing?” street encounters, I have not had any conversations with either the dad or that classmate since I left the local school system.
I don’t think I cared or was much aware if the difference In various mainframes then anyway. The “cool stuff” I was personally rabid about then involved different areas.
I remember that when my older brother was a freshman in college, one of his friends took a term off school and worked seasonal temp for a fed agency. I was still in HS. I told him (brother’s friend) about this game I had played a few times on a fed machine. He later (during his few months of employment) told me that this game was also on his work mainframe and that he played it once in a while when he thought he could. Whatever game it was. (I got the clear impression that he and and the other temp seasonal co-workers were stoned non-stop while at work. So who knows what they actually did.)
What game was it? Yesterday, I thought it was Colossal Cave.
Bad brain! Bad brain!
I can easily believe that the memory of what machine I got near then got all blurred. I didn’t really start to care until the late 70’s, when I got more access to mainframes. And I can’t even remember what mainframe I was using in grad school when I wrote and compiled code on it. (Never bothered with games then.) I just didn’t care at that time. My thoughts were elsewhere.
Back in the 1960’s, among my acquaintances, only people who were involved with a university, the govt, or certain kind of businesses and institutions ever personally got near computers (that I remember hearing about, anyway).
My dad swore at them a lot. Because he dealt daily with the airlines.
My mom deliberately sent in bill payments after putting staples into the punch cards, if she had issues, or disliked the company practices.
The game I played a few times during my public school years on this fed machine was a text based game played on a local mainframe.
And it had to be at least somewhat superficially similar to Colossal Cave. Perhaps in my mind/memory I managed to concatenate and mashup this this game (whatever it was) of my teenage years with a version of Colossal Cave I encountered later?
This is the possible or likely explanation. I was deliberately involved, back then, with various leisure and experimental practices that could easily mess with my memory. And there were personal issues - anxiety along others, tho I didn’t know I had anxiety then - which also mess with memory. And my memory has, for at least the last few decades, been either very very good (to there degree of being able to recount entire conversations and have other people who heard the conversations agree I just about had it) or a bit quirky and questionable anyway, depending in the topic.
And I’m not young.
The spread of areas in which I now find my memory to be kinda speculative astonishes me now. I used to be better. I think I can tell which memories I can count on and which ones not? But can I? Who knows? The brain is a funny thing. And it’s not like there is usually a way to check.
These memory detail fading that I started to notice more in the last 15 years or so (detail blurring and less ability to sharply recall many events that barely mattered to me at all, and some inability to recall sharp details of events that did and do matter to me) - - this experience of the odd loss of detail and of events used to disturb me.
Now my reaction is more usually to be amused at my own mentally frailty.
If I get (or already have) Alzheimer’s, or the rough equivalent thru TIA’s or other causes (brain degeneration based on a history of some head injuries from long ago, or whatever), will I be able to enjoy and ponder watching the mental loses happen, by living thru the happening of them, from some intellectual perspective or other, the capacity for which I manage to retain?
Will I know that I don’t know what I once knew? Can I, being that way, find some sort of human value in that human experience, if there is no remedy? Hope so.
Will I, in that future, possibly being in that deteriorated state, be within a dream of life that has its intellectual and personal and honorable compensations in some manner? Hope so.
Two decades ago I could easily recall in detail many events from childhood and young adulthood. Now I often need a trigger to bring them forth, unless they were a big deal to me. And accuracy? I try for it. I am certain - or have deluded myself that “I am certain” - about some things that matter to me. But am I certain?
Live and unlearn?
I did encounter a version of Colossal Cave in grad school but did not play it, to my memory. No time for that. Lab access was a pain and not my focus.
I did encounter the game ported to some version of PCDOS. And later, I think, to android.
When I played it thru, a bit, on the PC, I could have sworn it was an old familiar from my teen years.
I now wonder what game I actually did play in that Fed office I had no business being in, all those years ago.
Bad brain! Bad brain!
@f00l @Shrdlu Colossal Cave or close variants of it were ported to a lot of systems. I know it was at my hometown university in 1978, when I was in high school because we had a couple of terminal links to the university system and the seniors who had access were all over the game (and showing us lowly underclassfolks what we couldn’t play). That system was a CDC Cyber 70 Model 73, running the Kronos operating system. If they had been on a DECsystem (or VAX) I’d have remembered; we had relatives working for DEC in Colorado who used to give me all kinds of cool documentation and sales stuff, so I was enamored of it.
A few years later when I went to that university I was able to dump the FORTRAN code and the data files; the conversion dates in the comments all showed 1976-1978 original and modifications/ports.
Something about using a room-filling mainframe computer with washing-machine size disk drives and a dual-round green screen console with its own PPU just to play a simple game… such a feeling!
@Shrdlu
The way Wikipedia does those in-article file links: do they do that on purpose, because they don’t want images embedded elsewhere by linking directly from the article (as opposed to the image location)?
Any idea?
I suppose i could Google this.
Sigh. I’m a lazy bum today. Asking other people to do stuff I should be doing for me. Apologies. ; )
I miss Infocom (makers of the Zork series, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Planetfall, and many others) so much — such a great company with an absurdly wonderful sense of humor; I’d give anything to have all the stuff that came in the Infocom boxes (the “Feelies”), as well as all my old copies of The New Zork Times.
Those games were true treasures.
@kevincoleman Some of those games are available on GOG.com.
@kevincoleman Do you remember when they were forced to change the name of the newsletter by the new york times? Apparently new yorkers couldn’t tell the difference between the few page long New Zork Times and the quite large newsrag of record…
I “programmed” (copied a BASIC game from a book) a game called “Egg Drop” where a zero character came from a random spot at the top of the screen and you had to catch it in a \ _ / at the bottom. The commercial games I played most were Q*Bert, Number Munchers, and Oregon Trail
Also, Stickybear does whatever
Choplifter made owning a joystick soooooo worth it.
Also, did we forget The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
I almost broke my brain trying to get that damn Babel Fish.
One of my favorites was Odell Lake.
@TheCO2 I think that was supposed to be an educational game. It only taught me to fear birds with large talons.
@medz I loved the osprey. I don’t think the point of the game was to love the osprey, but I very much loved the osprey.
@brhfl @medz
Now you can love the osprey and eat it, too. Odell Lake
I enjoyed a lot of the classic Apple II educational games, like Oregon Trail, and the MECC titles.
I did want to mention that if you have any Apple II software/disks, you should definitely get in touch with Jason Scott about getting them preserved: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5180
Especially if you have educational, office, or other non-gaming software, it’s possible that no one has made a copy of it.
What about Montezuma’s Revenge? My friend had that one and we spent tons of frustrated hours on it. Also played a lot of Swashbuckler IIRC.
I loved the Prince of Persia game, but I don’t think I played it until I got my Apple Centris 650. Fuck, those were good times.
My only exposure to the Apple // was at school, so I have to default to Oregon Trail. We had a Commodore 128, though, and I played a hell of a lot of Dig Dug on it.
M.U.L.E.
@xeju Oh hell yeah.
In first grade, I think, the only thing I wanted to do was shoot squirrels in Oregon Trail on the classroom computer. I mean, once the buffalo (or was it deer?) were gone, presumably extinct from overhunting. As far as I was concerned, that game was a lot of wrapping paper around a bullets exchange, and then the shooting. Blankets and food? How important can blankets possibly be, and food… we’ll have plenty of food, because of, the animals.
Didn’t discover Infocom games until (probably?) long after they were out of business, with the games themselves running on emulators. I must have still been pretty young though, because I don’t remember, at least initially, making much of an attempt to solve them without cheating. So simple minded: having a computer display text saying that I had acquired… whatever treasures (an egg?), felt like achievement, or maybe wealth.
Had no idea that Castle Wolfenstein and Prince of Persia were conceived of that early on. Now I’m curious…
@InnocuousFarmer The first two Wolfenstein games were 2D, and they weren’t all that great if memory serves. In one of them you were basically pulling off Operation Valkyrie, don’t remember what the point of the other one was. Wolfenstein 3D was inspired by these games, but none of the same devs, etc. worked on it - the company that made the first two was long out of business & the trademark up for grabs.
LODE RUNNER!! Thanks for reminding me of that awesome game on which I wasted so much of my young life.
@mamajoan That was another one of my favorites! I don’t know how it is, but there is a Lode Runner Classic game in the iTunes store. Lode Runner Classic Site
@mamajoan My brother made some hundred or so levels for me to play. That was a great game.
@mamajoan @Vrysen And it’s available for Windows Phones too @narfcake!
Roadwar 2000
King’s Bounty and Miner 2049er. Both available for Apple but I played them on my Commodore 64.
I remember when the Appl IIe came out. My dad got us one and I would spend hours upon hours playing Aztec
Tuesday Night Football probably got the most play with my friends and I.
But Lemonade Stand did rock.
Time Zone!
“I can’t believe you left out Commander Keen!”
/giphy commander keen
@Josephus Unless there’s some non-ID/Apogee title named Commander Keen, I think you’re in the wrong era- they were DOS games only.
A fantastic game for sure.
@dashcloud oh, I just ignored the Apple-centric nature of the discussion. An era is a time period, after all, and I think Keen was in the right time-frame.
@dashcloud @Josephus It’s a weird conundrum; I too would think of Commander Keen as being in the PC-DOS era, which (to me) is past the Apple II era. I think of the Apple II in the same breath as the C64, the Atari 800, the TI99/4A… but they were still being made just months before Doom came out.
I do think of Commander Keen as being beyond the capabilities of an Apple II and therefore ‘beyond the era’, but realistically that was one heck of an era.
Good games, though. Need to get the GBC game.
I’m technically too young for the Apple IIe, but my favorite genre of video games has roots in that era.
/image roguelike
@Kawa Huge roguelike fan here… all of my friends decided to do favorite video game characters for halloween one year, and I just had a big pixelated ‘@’ printed up on a tank top. I think people just thought I was like… lazy Twitter or something, but I got a kick out of it.
@brhfl Ooh! Always exciting to find another roguelike fan in the wild. Which one’s your favorite?
Hahaha I love the idea of an @ sign costume! A gray @ on a black background is my avatar on most sites nowadays. My partner actually got me these @ earrings on my birthday this year:
@Kawa Those are great!
My favorite for the past few years has probably been Brogue. It’s definitely very streamlined compared to Nethack/Slash’em, which is appealing when my brain is feeling blah. The aesthetic is wonderful for a game that’s still text- and not tile-based.
As for the more traditional route, I used to be in the Slash’em camp, but stick to Nethack these days. Couldn’t really say why. I often play on the alternet server.
Semi-related, just recently got a copy of Cave Noire for Game Boy, and it’s really a fun little dungeon-crawler.
@brhfl @Kawa If you’d like, you can play lots of the early Rogue like (including Rogue itself) games on the Internet Archive (the MS-DOS versions for sure, likely the Apple II ones as well).
@dashcloud Rogue is definitely available on apt (Debian/Ubuntu) and homebrew (macOS/Darwin) as well.
Hoping @Kawa jumps in with some more recommendations…
@brhfl @dashcloud I know much more about the roguelikes still in semi-active development than getting one’s hands on relics. There are actually too many to list here, for all sorts of platforms. (I personally love Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup in the free/open source for PC domain; for paid roguelikes, Dungeonmans is probably my favorite; for Android, Shattered Pixel Dungeon is fabulous.)
I will say, Rogue, despite being the namebearer, is not the first game that had randomly generated dungeons on a PC - that actually goes to Beneath Apple Manor, which is also in Internet Archive.
@Kawa Brogue really is probably the most recent one I know (maybe Pathos on iOS), so it’s good to hear other modern recommendations. I need to get into DCSS, it’s on my machine, I just haven’t taken the time to soak it in yet…
@brhfl Like Nethack, you can play DCSS over server - crawl.develz.org will give you a good and intuitive list. You can even play in browser connected to a server!
Other mostly-active free/open source roguelikes nowadays: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, UnReal World, Tales of Maj’Eyal. I don’t know if Infra Arcana is still in development but it’s lovely too.
Paid roguelikes worth investigating: HyperRogue (also has a free version but I think the paid one is getting all the updates; also available on Android but a bit clunky), Caves of Qud (very actively updated), Sproggiwood (stunning, available on mobile and not clunky at all), Ancient Domains of Mystery (again, also a free version but the paid one gets the updates)
And that’s before the wave of procedural content in other indie genres came through. If you like platformers (I don’t), Spelunky is the first and still probably the best in that combo; FTL Faster than Light (sci-fi ship battles) and Crypt of the NecroDancer (rhythm game, but with a no-rhythm-required basic roguelike mode) are my personal favorites. I’ve also heard good things about Superhot (bullet time first person shooter) but don’t have personal experience with it.
@Kawa @dashcloud @brhfl Was just closing some old tabs – how’d I miss this thread? I love roguelikes. Used to play Moria on a Palm OS thing. Got farthest, I think, with a Dwarf Priest. Sunk lots of hours into Angband, mostly vanilla. Have been playing Nethack a little here and there over the past few months, too; that and the “recent” game Dungeons of Dredmor, which is geared to be “accessible”, but makes me mildly frustrated with its controls.
I keep intending to get into Brogue, ADOM, DCSS, a few Angband variants, maybe even ToME… these things are time sinks, though.
Honorable mention to FTL and Risk of Rain, which I’ve dumped way too many hours into, but those are definitely not roguelikes. They’re pretty roguelike-like for not being roguelikes though. More than most of the rest of the games that get that label, I think.
Does nobody remember Lemmings!? I think this wasn’t Apple II, but Commodore 64. Still it’s close… and freaking awesome!
@IWUJackson Slightly later than C64 or Apple II (well, I guess Apple II stuck around for a pretty long time), was Amiga and DOS. Great game!
Hard choice, there are some good friggin’ games listed.
Wizardry
@moonhat
Yup.
@moonhat I was actually recently looking for the original on Steam. They have some of the later ones.
although i am of age for oregon trail, not only did we not play it in school but i’d never even heard of it until years later when people started making ‘dying of dysentery’ jokes on the internet.
the only things i remember about computers in school are as follows:
@jerk_nugget
What are ALAP and EOP? I have no idea what these refer to. (Can’t read up at the moment).
What was it like being a kid and student in these settings (or whatever they are)?
@f00l they were some kind of advanced placement groups for kids. in elementary school, being in ALAP (accelerated learning activities program) meant about five of us were bussed off to another school to do projects with a couple of other small groups of kids. i’m not sure anymore how often it happened. not every day or even every week. we also sometimes went just to another room in the school to do schoolwork that i guess was ahead of what the other kids in our class were doing. i also went to a different classroom for a few years each time we did reading to sit with a more advanced class. (i never liked that bit though because i thought the teacher was really mean. i wonder if she really was or not. maybe she just had a loud voice and took no shit.)
http://warwickalap.org/faq.html
despite being an HSP (highly sensitive person, which i have learned is actually A Thing) i was pretty unfazed by it all, never felt ‘othered’ or weird about it. i’m pretty laid back and take most things in stride, then and now. come to think of it, i probably liked it because i was around kids in small groups (way less overwhelming than whole classrooms) and they were like me - they wanted to learn and do the work, they didn’t want to mess around or act up. it likely gave me a much needed break from all the stimuli of ‘regular’ class.
in fifth and sixth grade, i also was a “reading buddy” where you would go and sit with younger kids in their classrooms and help them with their schoolwork and read to/with them. i remember no one wanted the reading buddy i got, i think she was on the fringe of special needs. i think that’s why they assigned me to her. she was a sweetheart. her name was mabel. i had her younger sister the next year. they were both great kids.
i even used to fill in for the secretary at lunch time. instead of sitting with other kids in the cafeteria & then going out for recess, i ate in her office at her desk and answered the phone, put flyers in the mailboxes, etc. in hindsight i think it would be awfully funny to go into a school’s main office and find a ten year old running the place, but there i was.
EOP was what they called it when we moved on to junior high (7th & 8th grade) except it was more focused, and took place at the school and occupied a regular period of your schedule. i definitely remember ‘choosing’ computers but i couldn’t tell you what EOP stands for or anything more about it! junior high happened so fast it all seems like a foggy dream.
@jerk_nugget
Well, I just learned a bunch of what happened in the school systems after my time. So thanks.
One curious small difference over time: When I was in elementary school, we all used cartridge fountain pens. You took them apart and screwed in a new cartridge when the liquid ink ran out. They could explode or leak. The ink took time to dry and could be smeared around. If the papers got damp or wet, the ink ran on the page.
My 5-years-younger brother started writing in ink with ball point pens. Or so he remembers.
When I showed him a pic of the kind of fountain pens we used, he denies remembering ever using one.
@f00l i can’t imagine trusting kids today to use a cartridge fountain pen! thirty kids and desks covered in ink
i think we used pencils pretty much exclusively for most of elementary school.
@jerk_nugget
When we started using ink pens in school (third grade?), I think they were similar to these:
This vid is not identical to what I used, since the ones I used had a clear plastic container for the cartridge, so that you could see when it was getting empty.
This one in the vid is also prob a bit nicer than the one I used.
Did writing with them make that pen-on-paper sound, always? My memory is blowing up on me here.
Perhaps I should get a nice pen. If I had a pen I kinda treasured, perhaps I would take the effort to make my current handwriting look like something other that randomized marks indicating various expressions of physical pain.
Wow. just googled “bad handwriting” and looked at images.
My handwriting is worse than what I’m seeing in Google images, excepting the examples that look super-rounded and written by the very young.
My handwriting used to be decent-to-attractive, and legible.
Now it’s worse than this:
I think I’ve just completely forfeited the hand-muscle strength and stamina, and fine motor control, by acts of total neglect and disuse.
Now I’m a bit mortified.
years later my parents did get their first computer - a gateway - which i pressured them to choose because i liked the cow. and when you went to the store they had free black & white cookies and lemonade. and a big dark room to watch movies in. (i believe i first wanted an apple because it had a rainbow logo, and my friend had one, but that idea was shut down for some reason.) anyway, i recall the PC had a ‘suite’ of puzzle games. my favorite was fringer - idk if anyone remembers this game but it was a bunch of knotted hanging ropes you hand to untangle before moving to the next level.
second to that was jewel chase. missed dinner a couple of times because i was so addicted, and my mom got tired of calling me up from the basement and thought it would teach me a lesson.
@jerk_nugget FRINGER!!! Thank you!!! My grandpa had this computer and I could not remember the name at all!!!
@mlhobby happy to help! honestly you’re the only other person i’ve ever come across who remembers it lol! if it weren’t for google i’d have thought i dreamt it by now.
@jerk_nugget
I personally didn’t like Fribger, though I liked Jewel Chase.
I also liked Rat Poker.
/image murphy’s minerals
Not sure when it game out, but…
/image scorched earth game
@medz Damn this thread is reminding me of some good games.
@brhfl If not already aware, check this more modern version:
/image worms game
@medz Scorched Earth… damn. Hotseat multiplayer on that was entertaining as all get out.
@meverett Yeah. My favorite was dumping a big glob of earth on their tank and they had to shoot their way out. :trollface:
@medz Scorched Earth was from the late 80’s early 90’s on DOS. Pretty interesting game overall.
Visicalc. That was a game, wasn’t it?
I was a kid in the eighties but I went to a crap-ass middle school that had one computer per 120 students instead of consolidating all those computers into a lab. Hence, the popular kids played plenty of educational Apple II games, and I got to sit around twiddling my thumbs until I could go home and play WordZap, Digger, and Harlem Adventure on the PC.
@whogots
I know I shouldn’t ask, but, what is “Harlem Adventure” I googled it and got nothing.
@number51 Oh lord, there’s no way I’m going to search for it from work. It was a freeware text adventure that came on a 5.25" floppy of games that one of my dad’s coworkers gave us. I played it because it was the only thing we had; the computer wasn’t a toy, so no money was spent to make it into one.
The game took place in a grim 1970’s version of NYC, and I’m sure it was racist. I never got past the getting-eaten-by-mangy-dogs phase, so I don’t even think I encountered any human NPCs. I guess I brought it up as a snide example of the anti-educational crap I was exposed to around the same time my school was letting the bullies monopolize Carmen Sandiego.
I voted for Castle Wolfenstein “Halt allspice!”.
My two favorites were F-15 Strike Eagle and Wizardry.
BTW it wasn’t just an Apple II, it was an Apple IIC I’ll have you know.
I would always set my wagon to “grueling” pace in Oregon Trail, since that was the fastest. Then everybody would die, because it was too grueling.
I didn’t know what “grueling” meant.
/giphy grueling
I didn’t have an Apple 2 and the only game my friend had for his was The Bilestoad. Wikipedia describes it well: “In The Bilestoad, players control “meatlings” that hack and battle with axes and shields from a top-view perspective.”
I answered King’s Quest (various iterations of which we played at home on our PC), but the game I usually chose at school was The Myths of Olympus.
I loved playing “Dr. J vs. Larry Bird” on the TRS-80s we had in high school.
Does anyone remember “Ultimate Reality” for the Atari computers? (I had the Atari 800, AND A CASSETTE DRIVE.) I really enjoyed that game, but also loved the music of it, too. Can’t seem to find a thing about it anywhere online though…
/giphy Ultimate Reality
The Apple II had a nearly arcade-perfect official port of Mario Brothers. (Not Super Mario Brothers, the original.)
I believe it was the last Nintendo game to appear on home computers to this day.
We teach the classics up in this house. I’ve got an Atari 2600 connected to a curved 55" 4K Samsung and an Apple IIe (Platinum bitches!) with a Dell 20" flat panel. If my 9 year old does well with the Infocom text adventures we let her have some fancy graphics!
I can’t believe you forgot the Might and Magic series…
I LOVED those @Selgeron!!
@Selgeron Still have that one in the box.
All this game nostalgia! Maybe this is the right place to ask a question…
I played a game on a friend’s C64 at a party easily 30 years ago now. It was a hotseat 4-player multiplayer space strategy game I believe. All I remember about it is that you’d build a fleet, send it to one of your opponents planets, and do battle.
It was a crap-ton of fun! I never saw it again after that party and can’t remember the name. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
@devtony It may very well have been Advanced Space Battle?
/image advanced space battle commodore 64
@brhfl Ooh. The description of the game sounds close. It has far fancier graphics than I recall. I think the game was just a simple grid on a white background.
Still it looks like this was inspired from the game I remember and gets good reviews. Might have to find an emulator and give it a try. Thanks for the tip!
@devtony No problem!
I have a shocking confession, I never played games on my C64. I just usta bullshit around on BBSs and do my homework. Had a 300 baud modem and could log onto school mainframe from 11pm till 4 am. No standing in line for me. do my programming assignments send them to the printer and pick them up on the way to class in the afternoon.
@cranky1950 I had a Cp/m module for it too, it could do machine control.
Conan the Barbarian
@debuque
Wasn’t Conan a Barbarian and Librarian from Marion who feasted on Carrion?
@f00l She said Mayor Lindsay gave her the crabs.
@cranky1950
Crabs are more a Maryland thing than Marion thing, I think.
But, of course, if you follow Mayor Lindsey everywhere he goes, moi telling.
@f00l I think Marion picked them up from mayor Lindsay’s trombone. Probably on a Wed between matinee and the evening performance.
@cranky1950
I think it was actually Florence Henderson, not Shirley Jones, who got too close to Mayor Lindsey for comfort?
Florence Henderson Describes How Former NYC Mayor John Lindsay Gave Her Crabs
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7246404
@f00l damn always get those 2 mixed up
If we want to open this up to later generation games I could come in with a lot of DOS/Windows 3.1 games, but maybe that’s a poll for another day…
Never had the Apple or Amiga that I wanted, but I played the hell out of a game I think was called Ghana Bwana on the TRS-80. In my head it seems like it was a Pitfall clone. All my Apple games were played at school, and the vast majority of that was Oregon Trail.
Got a lot more experience in the DOS game world but as @jqubed said, that’s another show. I’ll save those tales for when that topic comes up.
King’s Quest was my fav. I was only 10 at that time and I couldn’t play a lot. Today I like {POSTING SPAM}
@kellyon Way to play the long game for link spam! 290 days is admirable dedication to hang around to post garbage and then get your post deleted.
/giphy long game spam
I hope this casino with gratuitous ck’s is not related to Louis CK.
Cc @thumperchick
Used to sit at the Apple ][e in the back of my 6th gr. classroom c.1986 and play Cross Country USA for hours… except we had a monochrome green screen.
Hearing that title screen theme after 30 years brought a smile to my face. lol
Nice. I liked playing Zork in school
you young whippersnappers you. LOL
I played wizardry and zork and hitchiker
Losers. French Postcards was what us cool kids were playing.
Of course, the obvious …
Soft corn adventure
Hot Coffee anyone?