🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 16:50:19 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>The first computer game I owned - barring whatever came on the
>"Getting Started" diskettes for my Apple IIc - was Zork I. It wasn't
>the first video game I played - that was probably Pong - or even the
>first computer game - my memory is hazy in this regard, but I think it
>was Ultima I - but Zork is where I officially count my start as a
>computer gamer. Not dependent on an endless stream of quarters or the
>use of somebody else's hardware, I could play Zork whenever I wanted
>and at my own pace.

The old game post made my spidey sense tingle, I haven't read the
group in a long time. ;-)

My first computer game was for my first computer, the Atari 800xl. It
was Temple Of Apshai. A Dungeons & Dragons type adventure game.
Everything about it appealed to me at the time -sprawling levels, cool
monsters, character creation. At the time it looked to be the early
80's rendition of Skyrim. I somehow ended up with the game before
having the computer and the anticipation was bonkers.

Unfortunately, I think it was written in Basic and was pretty much
horrible. The setup for PC gaming letting me down for decades! haha

The first video game I played at all was Atari Stunt Cycle. They had
it at the 7-11 at the corner of my neighborhood and my mom gave me
money to play it. I've thought about buying the machine just for the
sake of owning it, but its pretty one-dimensional for home use. Once
you commit the throttle settings for the bus jumps to muscle memory
there is really nothing else to do.

I also had Zork for the 800xl. I was never huge on text adventures (I
loved stuff like Castle Wofenstein), but my buddy took graph paper and
made a map of the word. I'd love to see that map again. If I remember
correctly there were a couple of direction anomolies with the world,
adjacent rooms you could only access from on direction. This caused
him to have to re-draw the map multiple times since it wouldn't fit
into a perfect N-S-E-W grid of blocks. He finished the game, I never
bothered to do it even with the map.