80' s home computer nostalgia (was: Anyone remember Zork?)

...the original games, that is... around ' 81, ' 82 or so... I just downloaded the game (77K zip file - ha!) and can' t believe the memories that came flooding back... mapping out the rooms by hand, so I knew where I was... amazing. Such a nostalgia trip. I maintain that these games had a mysterious imaginative quality to them that was unlike anything else.

Those of you that are old enough to remember buying and playing these games... check it out!

BEST GAME EVER!!! (Zork I)

(ok not really, but its damn cool)

I used to play that game on my radio shack TRS-80 with 64k of RAM(high tech at the time). The game loaded from a cassette tape deck. Thanks for making me feel really fucking old. That was like 7th grade.

404 Zork.

Granted, the first adventure I played when it was still new was Liesure Suit Larry ITLOTLL on Amiga. I remember sitting for aaaaages trying to get past the age check, which was half the fun of the game.

If you are into this kind of games, check this one out:
The Colossal Cave Adventure
This is The Game of all games.

BEST GAME EVER!!! (Zork I)

(ok not really, but its damn cool)

No, it really is the best game ever...

" Its dark, you are likely to be eaten by a Grue."

Wow, that really does bring back memories. I still have my old 128K Apple //e in the basement and it still works. I go down and crank up Moon Patrol every once in a while, but I remember when I first got it spending countless hours at the old text Zork games. That freaking maze in Zork I is a bitch - I spent days in there! And there was nothing like bringing your lantern into the gas room and blowing to smithereens. I recall being in awe of Zork Zero because it had online hints. Ah, the pre-Internet days...

I used to play that game on my radio shack TRS-80 with 64k of RAM(high tech at the time). The game loaded from a cassette tape deck. Thanks for making me feel really fucking old. That was like 7th grade.

Ha! The ol' Trash-80... had the very same setup. My dad and I had a subscription to Compute! Magazine (and another one I don' t recall the name of) and input the games they included, in BASIC and in ' machine language' ... sometimes the programs would be as simple as " Random number generator" (wow) or as amazing as " Laser battle" which would consist of an equal sign firing periods at an " M" , which would explode (asterisk) and give you some points. Ah, the glory days.

When I ' upgraded' from the Vic-20 to the C64, it was like a whole new world. Compute! had a magazine that was dedicated solely to Commodore gaming... I' d love to see some old issues of it, would be so amazingly archaic to today' s youth, but it was SO cutting edge at the time.

I was ' spoiled' , and had both Commodore AND the Atari 400, which cost several hundred dollars. Incredible. I can remember having a bunch of games on each floppy disk (5 and a quarter inches), and then a friend told me you could punch a hole in the left side of the disk and put more games on the OTHER SIDE! Glory! Anyone remember that little menu that would appear, with the game titles, and when you selected your game, the text would shrink while it loaded, and made all those funny noises?

The very idea that I would be able to do what I can do now with my ' home' computer, a mere 15 years later, would have been inconceivable to me then.

Ok .. I just started playing .. what the hell am I doing?

Ah yes.... check out that 1050 Disk drive... that thing was a beast, the photo doesn' t even do it justice.




Love this ad, too. 64K RAM!!! What a selling point!

 $> man woman
 $> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
 

Yeah, that' s a great ad. 8500 bucks, and not even with the monitor (or mouse) included.

Nowadays, mice are sold dirt cheap, in giant bins with a scoop.

And how about that ' lightning fast' 20mhz chip?

Was that the same game that was on the WANG system? I remember having one of those with the 3 foot tall floppy discs. Those were the shiznit! I remember bringing a WANG server and terminal home for my mom when one of my first jobs was dumping theirs, she was so psyched because she was the only person in her office who could work from home!