nostalgia

My favorite video games from a hundred years ago

Pong was the first popular video game. I first played it in a darkened pizza restaurant in 1974, the video screen casting an eerie blue glow on those gathered around it. I was nine years old.

And hooked.

In 1976 we got the home version of Pong. It had two control knobs built into the console. My brother used his advanced high school electronics wizardry to pry the knobs out and then attach them to longer wiring, allowing us to sit back and play while reclining on those giant weird pillows that were so popular in the 70s. It was great.

Through the mid-70s and early 80s, my love of video gaming saw me spending many an hour in video game arcades–my first full-time job was handing out quarters at an arcade. The job was about as exciting as it sounds, but it was still cool to be surrounded by the light and noise of forty arcade cabinets. My manager was less impressed when a group of teenage boys gathered around a machine one night, managed to jimmy it open, and then empty all the quarters from it. Hey, I just thought they were really into Sub-Roc 3D.

Looking back, some of my memories and recollections of arcade games include:

  • the Williams games were technically dazzling and impossible for me to play competently. These included Defender, Stargate (no relation to the movie or TV series) and Robotron 2084. I loved these games but my roll of quarters would vanish all too quickly attempting to play them. I’m pretty sure I lost a ship just pressing the one player button in Defender.
  • while I enjoyed Time Pilot, there was something almost transcendental about its sequel, the space-oriented Time Pilot 84, that really hooked me. I actually got pretty good at this one. A local laundromat in Vancouver had it and I probably spent more money on it than others did doing their laundry.
  • I never quite mastered Dragon’s Lair but could play through (the superior) Space Ace with a single quarter. It was pretty much watching a cartoon with a joystick. That sounds wrong and in a way it was.
  • A friend and I played Super Mario Bros as player vs. player since you could push or otherwise manipulate the other player into the crabs, turtles and mean ice cubes. You didn’t get points by indirectly offing the other player but in a way that made it even better.
  • I remember thinking laser disc games were not the future. I was right (fortunately). Williams had one called Star Rider that was decent, cleverly using the laser-y part as a fairly seamless background to a respectable racing game (there’s even a YouTube video).
  • The cocktail table version of Ms. Pacman was awesome. Suddenly, standing in an arcade was obsolete (several arcades started providing stools).
  • The Movieland Arcade in Vancouver was one of my regular haunts and had a row of Sega’s Daytona USA machines near the front. Racing against friends was great fun. The arcade and those Daytona USA machines are still there more than twenty years later, but the arcade always looks forlorn and empty. The sign in the window also still advertises “girlie movies” in the back. I never watched the girlie movies.
  • by the mid-80s, we reached a kind of golden age of arcades. Most games were still 25 cents, with new games sometimes being 50 cents. Graphics had improved dramatically so titles like Toobin’ still look pretty good today. Home consoles were in the pre-Playstation era, so arcades still had a place with a technically superior presentation. That would fade by the early 90s. Coincidentally I was edging toward 30 and my own interests began pulling me away.
  • a friend and I played Cyberball against the Deluise brothers. I don’t remember why they were in Vancouver at the time.
  • another friend and I would drive from Duncan to Victoria to play games like Star Rider and Crystal Castles at Xanacade. Yes, we drove nearly an hour just to play video games. Both ways, in the snow!

Video arcades still exist, mostly on the appeal of massive novelty machines that cost a lot more than a mere quarter, but like many things you adore in your youth (hello, Mad magazine), the magic has faded. Alas and such.

Things I don’t miss from the 1970s

In 1970 I was six years old. Candy bars cost ten cents and I had a monster green tricycle that could easily have been featured in a kids horror movie. Maybe any horror movie. It was a terror to behold and to ride.

But for all the nostalgia I have for those formative years from age six to sixteen, there are a few things I’m happy to have left behind:

  • the 8-track tape. I’ve written about this before so suffice to say that as a music format it was terrible.
  • long hair. What was I thinking? I was not thinking.
  • rotary dial telephones
  • TVs with knobs, TVs without color
  • Pop Rocks candy
  • that KISS TV movie
  • puberty

The old list

Am I as old as dirt? I’m old as some dirt, not as old as other dirt.

These are things I remember as a kid:

Rotary dial telephones. People still talk about dialing a number on their smartphones, though there is a gradual shift toward using “calling” over “dialing.” With rotary phones you hated people who had lots of 8s or 9s in their phone number. If your finger slipped on the last number you had to start dialing over from the beginning.

Party lines. Picking up the phone and hearing others talking would be a plot for a horror movie now. Back in the early 70s it meant you were on a party line shared by others or your sister was gabbing to her boyfriend on the upstairs extension. “Get off the phone, I can hear you!”

The 8-track cassette. I’ve written about this before. It was the worst format for music ever, even if switching tracks was kind of neat. Like all terrible things, there is a small subset of people who love the 8-track cassette.

Black and white TV. We got a color set in 1975 and I discovered that Gilligan’s Island had color episodes.

The vinyl album. I guess that meant I grew up with a generation of audiophiles or something.

Typewriters. There was a room in the library at the Langara campus of Vancouver Community College that was filled with typewriters. It had a door that automatically closed for reasons that were obvious to anyone who entered the room when class assignments were due. I had my own portable Smith Corona and the only thing better than using it to write my own trashy stories (I did a lot more of that than actual assignments) was mashing as many keys at once. Why this was so entertaining I can’t precisely say.

Disco. The rise and fall and slight rise again.

The energy crisis. The first one.

The following stores: Eaton’s, Woodward’s, Woolworths, Woolco.

Video game arcades. Yes, these still exist in some form but I’m talking about the classic arcades of yore, with rows of games you paid 25 cents (50 cents if new) a shot to play. Duncan had a surprising number of arcades given its size. I spent most of my quarters in one adorably called The Saucy Dragon. I got my first full time job at an arcade at the age of 19, just as laser disc games became a very brief fad. I loved that job. I wrote my first novel working at that place. Handing out quarters was not exactly a demanding task.

Roller skates. You know, the kind that had four wheels, two in the front and two in the back.

Pong. Yes, I remember when Pong was new and futuristic. We’d drive the horseless carriage to the local pizzeria and play the cocktail table version, mesmerized by the bouncing phosphor dot.

The constant lurking fear of nuclear war. I was pretty sure my hometown wouldn’t get nuked but it was scary to think about all the same.

I can see the music

When I was 20 I didn’t really look back at the previous two decades of my life. I didn’t really look forward. Thirty seemed very old, in its own way. I didn’t even need to watch Logan’s Run to sense that. I just lived in the moment and stumbled along with youthful exuberance.

I remember being mildly traumatized when I turned 26, struck at how most of my 20s were behind me, that I was inescapably an adult and I would probably need to start acting like one. Three years later I grew a beard.

I never looked much into the future or thought about getting older much since the mini-crisis of turning 26. Turning 30 didn’t phase me and neither did 40. I started running at age 44 and by 50 I’d logged over 3,100 km jogging. At the same time I never really got into long term planning, never managing to successfully move beyond the stumbling approach of my youth. The difference now is if I stumble I have an increased chance of breaking a hip [old person joke].

What I have found in the last few years is an increasing tendency to look back to my youth and the things I enjoyed back then. This is nothing unusual, most of us do it as it brings a sense of comfort and familiarity as we grapple with the dawning realization that we are, in fact, mortal, and our time is limited, barring reincarnation as someone famous, spiffy or perhaps just a beetle that gets eaten by a curious cat. Or maybe post-death is some truly fabulous thing and no one ever comes back to offer concrete proof of this because our mortal minds could not handle that level of fabulousness.

All of this is to say that tonight I ended up on one of those nostalgia treks that led me to listening to the song “Something About You”, the 1985 hit from Level 42. It was a catchy song. I put the album its from, World Machine, on my wishlist in iTunes (not Groove, which, if it has a wishlist, probably adds random albums and songs that it determines are what you really want, not the ones you’ve selected, then deletes the list at some random point in the future, anyway). I continued my trek, listening to a smidgen of Cyndi Lauper, Roxy Music, Hole and yes, Nazareth. I found myself hovering over the Play button on Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” but had to draw the line somewhere. If you could wear out YouTube videos, I’d be close on that one.

I may have wishlisted the self-titled Boston album, though.

Most of my nostalgia is music-related because music is so of its time and is great at invoking memories in ways that TV shows, movies and books simply don’t. I’m re-reading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, for instance, but I couldn’t tell you when or where exactly I had read the book before, except that it was when I was young. I’m actually kind of shocked at how little I remember of the book (it’s quite good). But there are things I do sometimes look back on wistfully. I will reminisce about them soon in another post that pushes me that much closer to “old man yells at cloud” territory.

Magazines of yore -or- Back when I bought things to read on paper

I enjoy a good magazine. I also sometimes enjoy a bad magazine. I remember buying magazines off racks in corner stores, grocery stores and bookstores. I remember looking forward to some magazines a lot, a genuine highlight of the week or month.

I don’t remember the last time I bought a magazine this way (I’m all-digital now). It may have been a copy of Runner’s World a few years ago. I don’t miss paper magazines, exactly, because reading on a decent tablet has no real downside, unless the battery charge runs out. You can even zoom in to see extra detail you might miss in a paper magazine, handy for people not-as-young anymore.

What I do miss is the choices I had and the depth in some of those choices. The culprit, not surprisingly, is the Internet (or World Wide Web if you want to be more precise). This vast, always-available and (kind of) free source of information has directly replaced the way I buy magazines and more importantly has just plain supplanted many of them, especially when it comes to gaming.

Here’s a list of magazines I current buy regularly via digital means:

  • Runner’s World
  • Writer’s Digest
  • National Geographic

I occasionally pick up issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a one-off of others when a particular story interests me or a good deal is to be had (Rolling Stone, The Economist, Scientific American, etc.)

As you can see, it’s a pretty short list. All three magazines are available on newsstands but the digital versions are cheaper, I never have to wonder where I left a copy and they take up zero space. The zero space part is particularly nice, given the boxes of Writer’s Digests I used to carry around between moves. I’ve been reading it for over twenty years and buying it regularly. Storing twenty years of magazines is like trying to store an entire tree in the closet. It’s not convenient.

Here’s the list of the magazines I used to buy regularly. I’ve separated out the gaming and computer magazines because there’s so many of them:

Gaming:

  • Computer Gaming World (later Games for Windows magazine)
  • PC Gamer
  • Computer Games
  • Electronic Games (later Computer Entertainment)
  • Electronic Fun
  • Videogaming Illustrated

Computers:

  • Compute!
  • Home Computing
  • Creative Computing
  • Ahoy (Commodore 64)
  • Compute’s Gazette (Commodore 64)
  • PC Magazine
  • PC World
  • PC/Computing
  • ExtremeTech
  • boot (now Maximum PC)
  • Mac User (note: I never owned an actual Mac until after Mac User magazine was defunct)
  • Macworld
  • BYTE

Others:

  • Omni
  • Discover
  • Dragon magazine (more occasionally)
  • Epic Illustrated
  • Heavy Metal
  • Twilight Zone magazine
  • Weird Tales (one of its runs back in the late 80s/early 90s)
  • Fangoria (semi-regularly)
  • Cinefantastique (mostly for special issues, like the ones they had for Star Trek TV series)
  • Starlog
  • Mad magazine
  • Cracked
  • Entertainment Weekly

This is not an exhaustive list, as I would also sometimes buy news magazines (Time, Newsweek and Maclean’s), the occasional People or Us and not forgetting the magazines I’m forgetting. Some magazines don’t overlap much or at all–several ended their runs in the early 80s, some I grew out of, like Mad and Cracked, while others I just lost interest in. The cruelest were the ones that died before their time. I wanted to keep reading them, but market forces dictated otherwise. Some of my favorites were among them, too.

Here are my favorites:

  • Twilight Zone This only lasted eight years, and it was a terrific mix of short fiction (mainly horror) along with articles on TV and movies that had a TZ feel to them. It was intelligent and especially well-written for a genre magazine, no doubt guided by the hand of its founding editor T.E.D. Klein (an excellent if not exactly prolific horror writer)
  • Epic Illustrated This lasted a mere six years and ended its run due to a combination of high cost (glossy color throughout) and low sales. It was basically Heavy Metal without the giant boobs. A great selection of serialized and one-shot stories. I found it superior to Heavy Metal in that it seemed less oriented toward horny young men. On the other hand, Heavy Metal is still being published, so maybe Epic should have had giant boobs.
  • Omni A science magazine that had it all, including an admittedly obnoxious silver paper middle section that tended to leave your fingers silvery, too. A mix of fiction, features and regular columns, Omni made science seem accessible and fun. It even treated the subject of UFOs seriously, something virtually unheard of in any U.S. magazine not focused specifically on the subject. This actually lasted about 27 years in print form though in its later days it was hard to find locally and had become the proverbial shell of its former self.
  • Computer Gaming World One of the first PC gaming magazines and one that treated the hobby with respect. In its heyday in the early 90s (ie. just before the rise of the Internet) its holiday issues would come in around 500 pages. Most of that was ads, of course, but it was still a sign that the hobby was vibrant. It introduced the world to Jeff Green via a monthly column, a smart writer who always made me laugh. Sadly, he oversaw the demise of the magazine after it was rechristened Games for Windows. It had an impressive 27-year run (the last two as GFW).

Back in the music time machine with Queen

As expected, I used more of my iTunes funds to dig up another relic from my youth, this time the 1980 album The Game by Queen. I originally had this on vinyl and I remember the album slip was very silver and shiny.

How does it rate on the Neil Diamond sparkle shirt scale 33 years later? Let’s find out.

Sparkle shirt. Sparkly!

Queen, The Game
“What I knew of Queen in 1980 consisted of a few hits, notably “We are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You”, both of which I found slightly annoying even while admitting they were effective arena/power-anthem songs. I was, however, a huge fan of their silly mini-epic “Bohemian Rhapsody” and played my sister’s 45 enough to get her peeved at me. This was back when media could actually wear out, so her reaction was not entirely inappropriate. She’d also had a lot of her vinyl trashed by being left out in the rain by one or both of my brothers during one of their infamous sibling battles so she was maybe more protective than usual about her music collection. But I digress. I liked the song and yet Queen was never really on my radar.

In 1980 the band released The Game which was the start of a new direction for the group, mainly through the introduction of synthesizers and an overall softer sound. I recall their next album, Hot Space, was condemned in one review as being “over-produced” and The Game was definitely the first step toward that. At the time I wasn’t aware of any of this, all I knew is that “Another One Bites the Dust” was catchy as all get-out and a huge hit and was followed by the equally catchy Elvis callback “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, the video (pre-MTV) of which features the least convincing display of machismo ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE34cSvZCd8

With two solid radio hits I picked the album up and generally lurved it, though it falls into that curious collection of albums I really enjoyed and yet never purchased anything else from the same artist ever again. It remains the only Queen album I’ve ever bought.

Listening to it today some aspects are dated, mainly the way the synths are used, along with reverb and other sound effects. They mostly distract from the music, adding little to the songs.

The songs themselves cover a pleasing variety of styles in the span of a brisk 35 minutes. “Don’t Try Suicide” may still be the catchiest yet most cynical anti-suicide song ever, with lyrics like “Don’t try suicide, nobody cares/Don’t try suicide, nobody gives a damn”. “Rock it (Prime Jive)” features drummer Roger Taylor’s weird growling vocals and Brian May provides an appropriately smooth voice for his ballad “Sail Away Sweet Sister”. The focus remains on Freddie Mercury and he struts through the rest of the tracks with the confidence of a veteran performer (The Game was Queen’s eighth album). There are really no bad songs on the album, though “Rock It” comes across lyrically as a bit inane (Taylor also wrote “Radio Ga Ga”).

While at times a bit dated and dotted with unnecessary flourishes, The Game remains a strong testament to the talent of Queen. I can listen to it now and separate it completely from my time in high school when I originally bought it, which speaks to the overall quality of the music.

Rating:
8/10 Neil Diamond sparkle shirts

More trips into the mine of music nostalgia without a canary

After picking up The Dream of the Blue Turtles and with more money sitting in my iTunes account it was inevitable that I’d go trolling for more music from my youth. My latest re-acquisitions, in order of re-purchase with the original release date:

  • Boney M, Nightflight to Venus (1978)
  • Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms (1985)
  • Roxy Music, Avalon (1982)

I’ll rate the quality of each re-purchase on a scale of 1 to 10 Neil Diamond sparkle shirts, with 1 being “I plead temporary insanity” and 10 being “Still awesome, I had the best musical taste!”

Sparkle shirt. Sparkly!

Boney M, Nightflight to Venus
This album came out in 1978 and I bought it on vinyl when it was new, making it one of my first-ever music purchases. This doubles as a handy excuse in case the album is awful.

Surprisingly, it is not. Despite the silly title track (which is literally about a “night flight” to Venus) the album as a whole holds up quite decently, even if it is very much a product of its era, when disco was at its commercial (and artistic?) peak. The harmonies are sweet and though the songs often border on the bizarre (“Rasputin” celebrate “Russia’s greatest love machine”) they are just as often catchy. You will probably never hear a funkier version of “King of the Road.”

Bonus: I first bought this album on vinyl, which is now popular with hipsters and audiophiles but is otherwise a niche format. The iTunes album art is a photo of the CD case. CDs are also rapidly becoming obsolete in this age of digital music, so it seems somehow fitting that the cover of this musical relic is of another musical relic (May 17, 2022 note: original link broke, I have subbed something that is close to it):

Rating:
7/10 Neil Diamond sparkle shirts

Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms
This was one of the first CDs I bought, and it is of (pop) cultural significance in a couple of ways. It was the first CD to sell over a million copies–the format had debuted only two years earlier), it was such a giant success it basically ended the band and the hit “Money for Nothing” got banned in Canada because of the following lyric (which is delivered by the song’s narrator, a working class slob who ain’t exactly, y’ know, cultured):

Look at that faggot with the earring and the make-up
Yeah buddy, that’s his own care
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot, he’s a millionaire

The best part is the ban happened in 2011, 26 years after the song was released. The ban was later lifted. Details in this Wikipedia entry.

The album holds up very well. This is Dire Straits not only at its commercial peak but its artistic peak, as well. The songs–often sprawling on the CD version–are played with confidence, moving effortlessly between irreverent, rollicking and meditative. There’s a folksiness to much of the work that never feels forced. There is a timelessness to most of the tracks that lifts them above much of the material that dominated the pop charts in the mid-80s. Kids may wonder what all the talk about MTV playing music videos is all about, though.

Rating:
8/10 Neil Diamond sparkle shirts

Roxy Music, Avalon
This album was introduced to me several years after release by a friend. I was not familiar with Roxy Music and have never bought any of their other albums (the friend picked up some of Bryan Ferry’s solo work).

Avalon is one of those albums where everything came together in the right way at the right time. A lot of people who may be able to name Avalon as a Roxy Music album might be challenged to even name another the band put out (Avalon was their eighth and final album). This was the culmination of their smooth, adult-oriented rock sound and in a way they had nowhere to go after this, so the dissolution of the band following the Avalon tour makes sense.

To say this album is smooth is an understatement. The music washes over you like a gentle surf, lush synthesizers sweeping across the aural landscape, accented by guitar, keyboard and saxophone that complement but never intrude or dominate the sound. Ferry’s vocals are delivered just as smoothly, his voice often rising into a dreamy sort of falsetto as he warbles about the tragedies of love.

Somehow the production manages to avoid sounding fey or slick, perhaps because of the earnestness (I almost want to say conviction) Ferry brings to the material.

While there is nothing really comparable to Avalon in today’s pop music scene (that I’m aware of) the album still doesn’t sound dated to me. It is its own thing and a wonderful, lush thing it is.

Rating:
8/10 Neil Diamond sparkle shirts

On balance, it appears I had decent musical taste 25-30 years ago. I’ve still got money in my iTunes account and have been casting back to other albums of yore I haven’t re-acquired. I may have another to re-review soon™.

The reacquisition of my youth continues: The Dream of the Blue Turtles

Many years ago when I was fabulously poor (I was living downtown, I was urbane, young and almost hip but perpetually in low paying jobs or between the same) I sold off a whole pile of CDs because there was a store a few blocks from where I lived that would buy them for $5 each. Back then $5 was a couple of meals or more if you played your budget just right.

In the following years I have reacquired many of those CDs and there’s only one I can immediately think of that is still missing: Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, also known as The First CD Everyone Bought. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a fine album, I just never think about it.

It was just by happenstance that I ended up claiming back another lost disc, Sting’s debut solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. I came across a reference about a new Sting album coming out and thought it had been quite awhile since his last, looked up his discography on Wikipedia, read notes on his first few albums and remembered that the light and catchy “All This Time” was featured on the otherwise Very Serious The Soul Cages. I mean, just look at the album cover. It’s all art and stuff:

The Soul Cages album cover

I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be. I’m calling it Picasso’s Tent. Also mysterious is why this album (and only this one among Sting’s) is not available on the Canadian iTunes store.

Anyway, back to how I reacquired The Dream of the Blue Turtles. I watched the video for “All This Time” which is perhaps uncharacteristically silly for Sting then noticed a link to “Fortress Around Your Heart” from Turtles. I started watching that, instantly remembered how much I lurved the song, went to Itunes, saw it was under $10–impulse buy territory– and bang, re-bought the album.

Having given it a few listens for the first time in many years the album is not quite as jazzy as I’d remembered, though there are a number of jazz-influenced songs. At the time of its release (1985) jazz was strange and alien to me, so that was probably a good thing. As it is now, I find it adds texture to what is otherwise a very finely crafted pop album and the next logical step in Sting’s maturity as a songwriter. The lyrics are more sophisticated than The Police’s last album Synchronicity and the appeals delivered and causes raised have a more personal tone to them. It’s a good album and I’m glad I have it again.

I’m still not sure I want to re-commit to buying Prism’s Armageddon again, though.

My computer and video game history, an abridged edition

Inspired by a thread on Broken Forum (and an idea I had for a post ages ago) here is a nearly complete list of every video game console and computer system I have owned, with dates (where I can remember).

The Computers

1982: Atari 400. With membrane keyboard! This was really just a video game machine for me but it was awesome. It came with four (!) joystick ports, took cartridges and provided far better sound and graphics than any comparable video game system back in the day. I almost considered buying the kit that replaced the membrane keyboard with actual keys. Instead I held out until I got my next system.

[IMG]
Open the hatch, insert Star Raiders cartridge, lose rest of day.

1984: Commodore 64. The C64 shipped in 1982 but it cost $600 then and I couldn’t afford it. By 1984 it was selling in huge numbers and had been reduced to a mere $200. The one I got in the early part of 1984 was one of a notoriously unreliable batch (I recall about a 25% or so failure rate) and had a bad keyboard. The replacement worked fine, though and having a keyboard you could touch-type on was neat. This marked the first time I bought productivity software for a computer, a $130 word processor that I’ve long forgotten the name of. On the C64 you could create files about 2.5 pages long before you had to use dot commands to chain the files together for printing. It taught me brevity. I still have some of the data disks. I wonder if they would still be readable? In addition to being my first computer used for non-gaming stuff, it was also the first that I got peripherals for, namely an Epson dot matrix printer (designed to misfeed paper as soon as you turned your back on it), the 1084S color monitor and the infamous 1541 floppy drive. The first game I bought on floppy disk was Lode Runner. I actually picked it up before I even had the C64 and marveled over its floppy diskness. This was also a game machine, of course, with most games running from floppy and the best ones making use of Epyx’s Fast Load cartridge.

I still recall playing Infocom games and knowing I’d successfully figured out a puzzle because the 1541 drive would start clattering away (the game apparently kept the YOU HAVE DIED moves stored in memory).


Not shown: 1541 floppy drive a.k.a. Is It Supposed to Make That Noise?

1987: Atari 520ST. I had it with the monochrome monitor, so it was for Serious Business. I had WordPerfect 4.1 and WordWriter ST. I still played Phantasie on it, though. I eventually got the color monitor and tried and disliked King’s Quest III. I still remember where this computer sat in my apartment on Nelson Street in Vancouver and even recall writing specific stories with it. This was the first computer where I had dual floppy drives. I was clearly moving up.

[IMG]
A built-in floppy drive, a 2-button mouse and numeric keypad. Future: now!

1989: Amiga 500. Ah, the Amiga. I loved this computer. It felt sexy and modern and had tons of games and lots of other interesting and useful software for it. I had ProWrite, excellence and I think maybe one other word processor. Some people collected games, I collected word processors. I stuck mainly to ProWrite. I eventually upgraded the Amiga (my first computer upgrades ever) to AmigaDOS 2.1, 3 MB of ram and a 52 MB hard drive. This let me call up ProWrite nigh-instantly. Black Crypt also installed to the HD, which was nice. I kept the Amiga until I finally made the jump to PC and to this day regret selling it. Although pictured below, I did not have an external floppy drive for it.

[IMG]
Like the Atari ST but better.

1994: PC with Athlon 486-40Mhz CPU and 4 MB of ram. I eventually added a 2x CD-ROM drive to it so I could play Myst.

It starts blurring after this but along the way I had:

– Pentium II 120Mhz. I mostly remember playing Quake II on this with a Diamond Monster 3D video card (Voodoo 1 add-on card).
– Celeron 500 (for about two weeks before it got stolen from my apartment — three days before Christmas, ho ho ho)
– Athlon XP 1800. This was clearly a better system over equivalent Pentiums at the time.
– Athlon 64 (first 64-bit system, though it only ran 32-bit Windows XP)
– Intel Core 2 Duo 6850 with Nvidia GTX 8800. Back to Intel. I still have this system, though it is just parts at the moment.
– Intel Core i5 2500K (quad core). This is my current rig and it dates back to January 2011. 8 GB ram, Nvidia GTX 580, Windows 7. Pretty standard now but still runs everything nicely.

Video game systems

Atari 2600. It was still called the VCS when I got it in 1980. I probably had 30+ games on the system (I had a list somewhere at some point) and favorites would include: Adventure (duck dragons!), Superman, Video Pinball, Canyon Bomber, Circus Atari, Night Driver, Demon Attack (which I thought looked amazing for a 2600 game), Kaboom!, Asteroids (a surprisingly decent port) and a bunch of others I’m forgetting. For its primitive hardware, the system had some fairly captivating, if obviously simple, games.

And it came with two joysticks and two paddle controllers. That’d be $150-180 extra these days!

Intellivision. I didn’t know who George Plimpton was but I knew I had to have the Intellivision. I got it on cheap thanks to my brother’s wife’s employee discount at Woolworth’s. I never had as many games with it as I did with the 2600 but some were classics, even if that thumbwheel proved to be less than optimal. The Intellivision is also where I (more or less) learned the rules of American football. Favorites include Microsurgeon, Skiing (falling was especially painful), Armor Battle, Sea Battle, Astrosmash (this was almost zen-like in the way you could keep racking up a score as the shapes tumbled down from the top of the screen) and Major League Baseball (Yer Out!)

From the era when fake woodgrain was on everything.

Atari 5200. I had this around the same timeframe as the Atari 400, which was appropriate, because the 5200 was pretty much a 400 re-purposed as a game console. The joysticks were wacky non-centering analog things that worked great for games like Missile Command and not so great for games that required precise changes in direction, like Ms Pacman. One of the neat things was how the system would switch to a blank screen when you turned it off to switch cartridges, instead of blasting you with the sound of a static-filled TV display. I never had many games for this, mostly some arcade ports, but it was a decent machine. The cartridges were massive.

This sleek design still holds up 30 years later. That joystick…not so much.

ColecoVision. This had the potential to be the ultimate console, but it came out just before the whole market crashed in 1983. I still enjoyed it for what it was: a machine that consciously improved in many ways over its predecessors. The joysticks were better than the 5200’s, the keypad and buttons better than Intellivision. Graphically, it offered the closest to arcade-style graphics at the time. It also had an awesome pack-in game: Donkey Kong (this was before Nintendo locked it up forever). Most of the well-known arcade hits were already licensed to other companies so Coleco had to go with more of a B-list but there were some excellent games among them, if less known: Venture, Looping, a Smurf game that featured so-so gameplay but astonishing graphics for 1982, Carnival, Lady Bug and Mr. Do! The load screen was annoyingly long — apparently in an attempt to get the ColecoVision name permanently embedded in young and impressionable minds.

Kind of cheap-looking but the games were good!

After the ColecoVision I turned to computers for the next 20 years. It wouldn’t be until 2003 that I would pick up an Xbox. Three years later I got an Xbox 360 but found I used it so little I ended up selling it off. Today the Xbox is still hooked up to the TV and dusted off occasionally. I have a Nintendo DS, but it has largely sat idle since I got an iPhone last year. It’s so much easier to not have to switch cartridges around. The DS is a better platform for crossword puzzle games, though.

The official ‘old enough to remember Pong when it was new’ post

Let’s Play PONG.

In 1973 the population of Duncan, British Columbia was about 5000. Today, nearly 40 years later, it is still around 5000. Duncan is a small town, but it struggles to maintain that small town feel with outlying municipalities springing up subdivisions like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The tiny footprint of the city — all of two traffic lights on the Island Highway as you pass through — is being stamped with every kind of franchise imaginable, from Burger King to Home Depot to casinos and multiple McDonald’s.

But it wasn’t always like this. In the early 1970s the outlying area around the city was largely undeveloped. You could ride your bike (with banana seat, of course) on trails that ran for miles along the Cowichan River. The annual exhibition took place on agricultural land that existed within the city limits. When that first McDonald’s opened in 1978 it signaled the end of an era.

In 1973 one of the popular local eateries was an Italian restaurant called Romeo’s. To my young eyes it was a place of mystery and intrigue, an ‘adult’ restaurant with subdued lighting that made me think of a coal mine (the aesthetics were more appreciated when I got a bit older). The small lobby area, like the rest of the place, was dimly lit and had everything you’d expect — a coat rack, some seats, the stand where the hostess would greet you and take you in. But one day we went in and something new was there. It was a machine unlike any I’d seen before.

I’d heard of Pong and now I was staring directly at it: a cocktail table-style cabinet housing a TV screen, with controls on two sides that consisted of simple knobs. The surface of the table was glass. I watched the strange phosphorous glow of the display, simple lines and a small square of light gently arcing back and forth between two rectangular blocks or ‘paddles’. This was like something from Star Trek. I had to try it!

25 cents for one play. In 1973 and to someone who had yet to hit double digits, 25 cents was a lot of money — more than the cost of a whole candy bar! I rarely had any money on me. My older brother did, though. He regarded me as his personal slave, so it seemed unlikely he’d give or loan me the money to try it out. To my good fortune it turned out that Pong required two players. My brother would pay then ‘force’ me to play against him, keeping the hierarchy of owner/slave intact. Win-win, as far as I was concerned.

I don’t remember how that first game went. I’m going to say I won due to that intuitive little kid video game sense that so many little kids seem to have. What I do remember is how the simple act of turning that knob, seeing the paddle on the TV move in reaction and then hit that little square of light was magic. Magic.

A few years later we got a home Pong unit. My brother, who liked to tinker with electronics, managed to take the controls that were hardwired to the console and break them out into handheld units, allowing us to play without being three feet in front of the TV. We still played sitting three feet in front of the TV because that’s what you did but we had the freedom to move if we wanted to.

Pong led to the first video game system I owned myself — no negotiating with the big brother required! — the Atari VCS (later renamed the 2600). It didn’t come with Pong. The new world of video games moved quickly and already Pong was passé. It didn’t matter. Those early days of ‘electronic tennis’ had already confirmed that I had a new lifelong hobby, one I didn’t even know existed until I saw that glowing screen in Romeo’s when I was nine years old.

(reposted from a thread on Broken Forum)

Exhibit C on why I do not write poetry

(You can see Exhibits A and B here and here, respectively.)

Back in ancient times I wrote poetry because I had to.

Which is to say in my college creative writing class one term consisted of writing poetry. Though we had computers even back then (with snazzy dot matrix printers) I chose to write most of my poetry on one of the clunky typewriters in the library. The typewriters were all in a sealed room for obvious reasons. Just one of those 50 pound behemoths clacked thunderously, let alone a room of them. With my typing style (three fingers, strongly) the noise level was that much higher. BANG BANG BANG POETRY.

This is a scanned copy of the original. An unfinished draft of another poem called The Island is visible on the other side of the paper. As with most of my poetry, Pretty Bunnies and Happy Flowers was written in a single session with little thought and no attention paid to rhyme, meter or really anything that a poet should pay attention to. It was also not one of my submitted projects, probably because I knew better than to cultivate an unwanted reputation as a weirdo by letting others read it. Twenty-three years later the poem strikes me as less creepy and more stupid, a mockery of ‘serious’ poetry, which was my secret way of admitting I couldn’t write the stuff worth beans!

Travel with me back in time to Saturday, January 24th, 1987

Here, for your amusement, is my entire journal entry for January 24, 1987. I was 22 years old. As the journal was handwritten I often scribbled footnotes at the bottom of the page or in any other available space. I have attempted to mimic the effect here as best I can.

The most amazing thing about this and so many of the journal entries is how insanely thorough they are. It seems if I sneezed, I wrote it down. Also, do skates come in different sizes than shoes or do feet keep growing into your 40s or what? Because there’s no way I’d fit into a size 7½ these days (I wear size 8½).

***

Saturday, January 24, 1987. 11:33 p.m. A bad night is better than no night at all.

I blissfully, though (oddly) somewhat guiltily, slept in till around eleven this morning¹. After I got up I moved around the apartment lazily, carefully ignoring anything that needed to be done (laundry, dishes, etc. etc. and especially etc.)

Finally I sleepwalked to Pacific Centre, browsed for awhile and came home around five p.m. I ate a gourmet bachelor’s meal (Kraft Dinner and sausage) then went to the Youth Group meeting, even though I knew there was a skating party and that I probably wouldn’t go and would end up just sitting at home alone with nothing to write about.

But some people did show up, including Alex, who had obviously forgotten it was the skating party tonight². After a bit of talk and an umbrella demonstration courtesy of Don, five of us piled into Wayne’s scary old car and headed off for the Kitsilano Arena, secure in the knowledge that we were all fairly inept on ice skates. I didn’t wear a seatbelt (couldn’t find it) and that’s usually when I’m in a car accident. Tonight I lucked out and we arrived safely.

After forsaking my shoes and donning a pair of 7½ skates, I took my first few steps on the ice. I didn’t fall. Good. Now if I could maintain this consistency for two more hours, I’d be fine. I glanced over to the metal pushy things (hell if I can remember what they’re called) but decided I was approximately 15 years past the age where you can still use them without suffering through extreme embarrassment. Fortunately I did not fall during the entire evening. I almost hit the ice a few times but tried to disguise my slip ups as dramatic flourishes. I was not very convincing.

Wayne fell. So did Alex. Oddly, they both fell (at separate times) right in front of me. Am I a jinx or was it just a coincidence and they were actually so nauseated by the AWFUL music on the PA that they just plain fell over in disgust? (The music was 90% of all the country music you never, never wanted to hear.)

After some square dancing on ice (featuring a bearded man in a large dress similar to a can-can dancer), we abandoned the rink for the lounge upstairs. Much to my chagrin, no one, save for Peter and Wayne, from the group stayed. I stayed — for a few minutes, then decided to trot down to West Broadway to catch the bus. Lo, there was Alex!

We rode the bus together and walked a couple blocks up Davie, to where we had to turn off to get to his place. We talked about the group and he told me how it was difficult fitting in because he’s not very outgoing. That’s a problem (?) we both share. I asked him if he had any plans on doing anything. He said no, which was fine because I didn’t really want to go to a bar or similar establishment. So we went our separate ways and here I am thinking (and writing) about him.

A part of me (yes, I’ve set up a great joke for all the perverts out there) is attracted to him sexually but mostly the attraction is deeper, more substantial, something wildly profound like that. (author’s note — 25 years later I can verify that if you reverse the types of attraction listed here you’d have a more accurate picture) I haven’t found out anything about him yet that I don’t like (which is the quickest way for the bubble to burst. Imagine meeting someone you really liked only later to discover something downright putrid about them — such as they smoke or go to the bars a lot, two things I’d put on my list of “turn-offs”, right after nuclear war and static cling). But it’s too early to get a clear picture so I shall say no more (and besides, this isn’t supposed to be a diary. I’ve already divulged WAY TOO MUCH personal-type stuff. Tomorrow it’s going to be nothing but financial reports and stock market predictions).

RANDOM NOTES: I’m liking Gaudi more and more. It may be APP’s best album since Eye in the Sky. My laundry is threatening to slither out of its bag and attack me, so I’ll do it tomorrow. Also, the Great Canadian Dishes Saga will be concluded. Watch as Mr. Fork and Mrs. Knife go for a naughty dip plum-naked in a sink full of dirty utensils. Thrill to the excitement of plates clinking together underwater!

Hmm. It would appear I’ve run out of viable subjects to discuss. Perhaps I’ll say goodnight now.

Goodnight.

Log off: 12:23 a.m.

¹ this sentence deserves some sort of award for being so hideously, horrifically and otherwise badly structured.
² I had asked him previously if he was going and, as Mike crudely put it, he wasn’t exactly “shit hot” on the idea. I discovered he had not skated for 13 years moments before we hit the ice. This, perhaps, explained his lack of unsuppressable excitement.