Easy Disc Access

Here I am in 1986 playing Ultima IV. But check out the wall to my left; I used adhesive to affix floppy disc sleeves to the wall next to our Atari 130 XE. Handy. 

Here's what was likely going through my head at the time. 

Atari 8-Bit Cartridge Inventory, Continued

(Ignore my incorrect voiceover; this was 1982, not 1980). 

Thanks to Sean, here are a few more Atari 8-bit cartridges we owned back in the day: 

Dig Dug
Tunnel through the earth and use your pump to blow up monsters! Another excellent arcade port. 

Astro Chase
This is one of the few Atari 8-bit games with a cinematic opening of a sort, along with a really decent, if repetitive, soundtrack. You flew around the earth, using your joystick to fire laser beams in four directions. Very fluid and fast moving. 

Choplifter
This was one of our favourites. Choplifter was a 2D side scroller; you flew your helicopter behind enemy lines to rescue hostages. By holding the joystick down for a second, you could rotate your chopper to face toward you and shoot missiles straight down, good for blowing up tanks, or, if you were sadistic, shooting the hostages you were supposed to rescue. 

Q-Bert
Yet another arcade port, in this one you hopped around "painting" the tiles on a faux-3D pyramid while avoiding a purple snake and other hazards. Famous for "swearing" when Q-Bert dies. A fun, accurate adaptation.

Fight Night
I barely remember this one, and Sean thinks it may have been the last game he purchased for the Atari 8-bit (by that time, the 130XE). Here's a video:

Robotron: 2084
A fast-pace, frenetic shooter, the arcade version sported two joysticks: one to control your movement, and the other to fire in any direction. Rather than doing things the lazy way and combining those functions into one joystick, Atari packaged the Atari 8-bit version in a box that allowed you to sit two Atari joysticks side-by-side so you could replicate the way the arcade version played. Sean still has the box! 

Jungle Hunt
Swing through the jungle on vines without missing, swim through the crocodile-infested river, and run up the hill as boulders roll down at you, all so that you can rescue your beau from, well, a rather insensitive portrayal of jungle cannibals. Eek. Swinging on the vines was a lot of fun, though. 

Atari BASIC
Not a game but a programming language, Sean and I learned a lot about computers by fastidiously typing out programs from books and magazines and then experimenting with the commands we learned to create our own programs. 

Super Breakout
A game that's still fun to play today, bounce a ball against a slowly descending wall of colourful bricks in the hopes of smashing them all. 


Moon Patrol
Whimsical but repetitive, in this one you drive a dune buggy--or rather, a moon buggy--across the moon's surface, avoiding craters and the like. Not terribly memorable. 

Centipede
As in the arcade version, you control a little ship at the bottom of the screen, shooting at the centipede winding its way toward you. Mushrooms get in the way, and spiders complicate matters. Fast-paced and entertaining. 

Jumbo Jet Pilot
A very, very primitive flight simulator with terrible graphics. Not very good at all--a waste of money at the time, I remember thinking. 

Qix
This game was almost like impressionist  abstract painting--create squares on the playing field by drawing enclosures with lines while avoiding "sparx" and the Qix itself, a floating bundle of neon-coloured sticks. Great game. 

Frogger
Why did the frog cross the road? To earn some quarters. Another excellent arcade port. 

Protector II
A Defender rip-off, but I remember it being almost as good as the original arcade classic. Fly your ship horizontally over a cityscape and rescue people from alien invaders.

Speedway Blast
A driving game where you drive a race car through a small town while avoiding a really creepy giant snake-like thing with a quasi-human head. 

Ms. Pac-Man
Even better than Pac-Man, in terms of gameplay and fidelity to the arcade version. House of fun. 

Desert Falcon
This might have been the last XE cartridge I purchased; it was a diagonal side-scroller aircraft shooter with a vaguely Egyptian theme. 

Zaxxon
Another side scroller, with good 3D fakery (you could move up and down and side to side to avoid obstacles) and a science fiction theme. 

Shamus 
You're a shamus slinging shivs in an endless labyrinth, dodging robots and looking for clues to escape. Sean and I both really enjoyed this one, despite never winning. I don't think you could, really - there weren't a lot of games you could win in those days. 

Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator
It wasn't the greatest port of the arcade version, mainly because once again the original used vector graphics, but it was still a lot of fun tooling around the galaxy blowing up Klingons and Nomad. 

An XElent Computer

We retired the Atari 400 after several years of yeoman's service, replacing it with the more powerful Atari 130XE in the summer of 1987. This was the computer that carried me through my first two years of study at the University of Alberta, and it was also the computer that, combined with the Atari XM301 300-baud modem, pulled me into the world of electronic bulletin board systems, or BBSes. Before the Internet became a mainstream service, BBSes were the destination for early adopters of the world of online communications. Edmonton's BBSes were limited to discussion rooms and primitive file sharing, and most of the ones I visited could only support one visitor at a time, since most people back then had only one phone line. 

My favourite games supported by this computer probably would have been Rescue on Fractalus, Ballblazer, Preppie, Karateka, and Star Raiders II. 

Sean and I retired almost all of our Atari hardware a couple of years ago to help create more space at Mom and Dad's place. I rescued this manual, among other Atari detritus. I was going to recycle it, but Sean will take the materials into his care instead. They're certainly fascinating artifacts of a lost era. 

Where the Horror Lurked

 

The Lurking Horror also included this double-sided map of the catacombs beneath G.U.E. Tech. Beware all ye who enter here...

Remnants of The Lurking Horror

Even though I wasn't clever enough to do more than scratch the surface of Infocom's 1987 text adventure The Lurking Horror, the game's dread atmosphere, chilling surprises, and pervasive sense of doom made it one of my favourites in the genre. 

Infocom games were famous not only for their excellent writing and clever puzzles, but for the "feelies" they included with their games, such as this guide to the university you explore in the game.

More than just trinkets, the feelies often provided important clues to unlocking the mysteries of the game. The G.U.E. at a Glance guidebook included this map of the campus, accurate to the game. 

Unfortunately I lost it long ago, but The Lurking Horror box also included a rubbery creepy-crawly centipede thing, which served its intended purpose by startling me the moment I dug into the contents of the game. 

Paperclip

Here's the manual for the software that got me through the first two years of university: Paperclip. Paperclip was pretty primitive compared to modern word processors, but it did precisely what I needed it to do: made it possible for me to type and print my assignments instead of writing them longhand, which would have surely doomed my chances at graduation. 

Paperclip came with a unique form of copy protection: the Paperclip Key, a small grey dongle you plugged into the Atari 130XE's joystick port. Without the dongle, the software wouldn't operate. It took me years to wonder idly if the key was just an electronic switch that made the computer think a joystick button was being held down. So I pulled out the key, plugged in a joystick, held down the fire button, and lo and behold the software worked. A determined pirate could have copied the software, plugged in a joystick, and held the button down with electrical tape. Still, they wouldn't have gotten the manual, and for all the bother why not just buy the software...

Autoduel Manual

Here is all that remains of Sean's copy of Autoduel for the Atari 8-bit computers. It's a thick manual rich in complexity and lore, back in the days when computer games often included not only really well-produced manuals, but also maps, keyboard or joystick inserts and attachments, reference cards, and, best of all, little tokens and toys that represented something you might encounter in the game. 

Autoduel itself was a fantastic game, based on Steve Jackson's popular Car Wars strategy game. The premise is simple; you start out with $2000 and need to buy a car to start "auto duelling" in the arena or on the highways of the northeastern USA. Sean and I played that game for years, until at last the disc stopped working. 

The road to fun with this game got off to a rocky start, however. Sean bought the game with birthday and Christmas and allowance money he'd saved for quite some time, and the first copy we bought was defective. Sean and I returned to the computer store in Heritage Mall where he'd purchased Autoduel, and the proprietor refused to help, claiming we were returning it under false pretenses and had pirated a copy of our own before returning it. 

This is one of the few times I've gotten really, really angry in public. All I remember saying is "He's ten years old," in quiet fury. The man behind the counter grumbled and muttered a little more, but in the end he exchanged the defective copy of the game for a fresh one. Thankfully, the new copy worked. 

Incidentally, Sean and I recently Kickstarted the latest edition of Car Wars, so at some point in the future, when COVID-19 is no longer a threat, we'll get together to reignite the spirit of a game we really loved back in the 80s.