I know we have a few gamers out there, many of whom are half my age, so I'm interested to see where your journeys into gaming started. So having got that out of the way, I'll kick things off!
Another Vic In The Wall....
.... was the first game I ever bought for my VIC-20 back in either '82 or '83. It was a 'breakout' type game where you batted a ball against a wall, progressing through various levels. The gameplay was relatively smooth and I did enjoy playing it when it finally loaded!
Watch out for those acute angles!
It was of course on cassette as were nearly all games and home computer software back then. It was always a long and fraught wait for the download to load the game into the computer's memory (there were no built-in hard-drives back then). Any slight interference or even jolt of the player and the loading would fail and you'd have to start it again!
The game cost £7.99 and I bought it from Boots. That's right, mighty Boots the chemist sold computers and games back then, usually situated in a corner next to the albums and cassettes. You didn't know they sold records either?
The original Commodore Datasette. Like a brick. They later brought out a more streamlined and lighter model upon release of the C-64
The game was by Bug-Byte who were based in Liverpool, as were many software houses at the time. Many games were created by one-man bands. No teams of programmers, digital artists, sound engineers and project managers back then! Some of them had a sort of following. Eugene Evans started at Bug-Byte before moving on to form Imagine games. Another famous Programmer of the time was the incredible mighty Yak aka Jeff Minter and Llamasoft. His game titles included, 'Revenge of the Mutant Camels' and 'Sheep in Space' amongst many famous titles released throughout the '80s. Take drugs kids, you'll write great games!
Talking of cassettes, this game was on cassette as were nearly all games and home computer software back then. This had one big advantage. You could quite easily copy them and even better, take the game back to Boots and claim they were faulty and then exchange it for another game. I managed to get away with this ruse for about 4 or 5 months until the retail outlets cottoned on and began only exchanging them for the same title!
Copying the tapes in the early days was easy. It simply required a double cassette player if you were posh, or a little easily made PCB and a loan of your mate's Datasette if you weren't! I think I knocked about 20 copies of this out at a couple of quid a pop. The blank C15 data cassettes came from WH Smith in a pack of 10. No idea what, if any the difference was between a standard audio cassette and a data cassette except perhaps the price.
Notice the real screws. Useful for taking the tape apart and trying to rewind it if it got screwed around your tape heads!
Fifteen-minute C15s were more expensive than a standard audio C60! I also went on to making and selling the PCBs but it was messy work for little profit. Etching chemicals were pricey.
The pin-outs were simple. You had +5v and gnd before the cutout and then motor, read, write and switch sensor.
Following this, I managed to create a doubler where I could attach two regular cheaper cassette decks up which weren't actually cheaper after I'd trashed my brothers whilst experimenting!
To be honest though, even back then I wasn't a big gaming fan. The VIC-20 wasn't my first computer. I'd also go a ZX80 and ZX81 plus an Acorn kit that someone gave that I'd never actually managed to get working. The game was more for fun and for me to see what the Vic could do rather than play. I still much-preferred arcade games, in particular, Williams' Defender and there was no way that was going have a decent home computer clone and in my opinion, there has never been a decent version other than the original cabinet coin-op game.
I guess another great idea for a post would be peoples top 10 games! That would be difficult for me as there probably aren't ten games I've really liked or played hard in my lifetime or maybe there would be. I would have to give it some thought.
Anyway. The game itself is obviously very simple but it did hold my attention but as with so many hames back then, the levels didn't particularly get more difficult, they got faster and faster until which point it was impossible to keep up and so one tended to lose interest.
There was actually another reason I made the jump from the Z80 based Sinclairs to the 6502 based Commodores and that was because of the ports which apart from the expansion port, were easy to create stuff to plug into and easy to program. Many electronic hobby magazines of the day carried projects that were easy to make and program using both BASIC and Assembly but more of that another day!
Post a link to your first game post in comments, please. Share it if you want, get it out there on twitter if you want, if you don't then don't. It won't make any difference as I don't have $30 upvotes to dole out lol....
I will, however, send someone 10HBI shares to the post I like the most.