C is for Commodore

I can't remember the exact year. It was Christmas of 1988 maybe; I think I was three. Maybe four. To my appearance now, it has been a fixture in my life for nearly as long as I can remember. Maybe even my association with Christmas comes with a lost memory of a box opening, because boxes normally open then. Let's say, then, I was young.

What matters anyway is not how it came, but that it was there. The Commodore 128 personal computer. You can see screenshots of the start-up screen online, I'm sure: the 128 screen was monochromatic green, while the 64 screen was rendered in pleasing blues. The command prompt was ready, and the information at the top detailed the capacities of the system. A clue: the number of the system detailed how much RAM it had. In kilobytes. It was a scant, scant measure indeed.

So, there was a computer. That's nothing remarkable, maybe, except that my technological infusion began young and has continued until today, when I spend a decent portion of every day on one. Yes, it was a gateway. But what would it have been a gateway to for a four year old?

Games. Electronic games. I'd seen the tabletop versions of Pacman and Donkey Kong at Pizza Hut, but they were always busy with enthusiastic people and I could never get to play. I saw the whirring lights, the figures running up and down to the beck of a controller while all around the music was accentuated by beeping sounds.

And did we get games! Some were from Q-Link (a service I knew nothing about), some from the bargain bin at the store, some came through a subscription service called "Loadstar," and many were from Dad's friend Dave, who was bearded, bespectacled, and friendly. In the early days, I didn't get to play very much, because I didn't know how to load the games, and my loading them depended on the graciousness of my older sisters, about 7 and 9 years old. Finally one of them wisened up and one day taught me how to type in the command. I still remember it now. LOAD"*",8,1. "*" would bring up the default mounted image on the floppy disk (which, back then, was actually floppy). Many times you could type in a particular name to load a particular game on the disk. Even after I learned how to do this, I never played more than an hour a day, since there was preschool, playing outside, and so many other things to do. Plus, other people wanted to play. Nonetheless, multiply the time I spent per day on it over seven or so years, and it's clear I spent a lot of time playing.

There was a huge assortment of games, playable on the joystick or the keyboard (there was a mouse, but no interface to use the mouse with). There were arcade ports as varied as Donkey Kong, Space Harrier, Gyruss, Pole Position, Burger Time, Bubble Bobble, Paperboy - platformers, shooters, racing games, and anything in between. Then there were the text games like Zork, The Wishbringer, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When I learned how to read, these Infocom adventures provided a sort of futile amusement; they were difficult for adults, and for me provided some early advanced reading and wandering. Even when I was older, I still died frequently and quickly in them. There were games that (to my appearance) were originally intended for computers, like Winter Games, Boulder Dash, Monopoly, and Impossible Mission, all of which provided instant amusement. Winter Games especially was funny; when I got the person ski-jumping to land on their head, there was this weird sound that I have always since associated with either cursing or brain injury. There were the games that frightened the crap out of me, like Beyond the Forbidden Forest where the character would be walking along a dead forest and suddenly... it was different every time! A monster would come from the ground and eat you, some flying creatures would eat you... and all I had was a bow I couldn't use right. Those games were very short.

I played my first RPG (role-playing game), Phantasie III: The Wrath of Nikademus, that way. The character stats were randomly generated, though I think one could pick the class and race. In battle, the status of characters' bodies was shown, including whether they had lost any limbs. When I didn't die quickly, my party would have its share of one-armed fighters and one-legged magicians. It was advanced for its time, but not the greatest; I've played and loved many RPGs since, but that trend probably didn't start here.

Then there was the edutainment, either a Fisher-Price game where I had to drive a bus around and pick up different people before time ran out or a Sesame Street game. I forget whether there was anything actually educational in either of them; rather, they held themselves more faithfully to their status as a game for kids.

And finally there were the programs that came along with it. I used a primitive text editor for making and printing my own newspaper layouts (with outrageous stories), I used a hurricane mapper to graph out the most outrageous and fantastic hurricane trajectories and strengths (one being blasted out of Mexico by a thermonuclear device). I played a trivia game and, through trial and error, learned a lot about environmentalism. There was a very primitive paint program where I would make a few futile scribbles and then wonder how people managed to render them.

There were so many games going on that I've only scratched the surface; there were hundreds. We weren't rich, but the games were inexpensive (because they were old) and, as I mentioned, my parents had friends. I'd play alone, I'd play with my sisters, I'd play with friends, and I'd watch other people play. Sometimes my sisters and I, playing pretend, would make a menu up and type it out on the screen. When I was scared to be alone in the den, the big exception was when the Commodore was on, the lights were bright, and I could hear something from the speakers. My first paper for school, on the wombat, was typed up in the word processor. It was a big deal typing it up at that point, without any of the standardization that would come in only a couple of years with the spreading popularity of advanced word processors into schools. (And yes, font choice was advanced compared to what mine was.) It wasn't the center of my life, but it was important.

The end of the Commodore era came rather suddenly. By the fifth grade, 1996, I had a Sega Genesis and played it a lot. I could make a list of the games from that era I'm still nostalgic about. I probably played it more than I did the Commodore, but the Commdore had over ten times the games and had some classics besides; I couldn't help going back frequently to pay homage. That's imposing a half-truth; I knew the Commodore was old, perhaps, and knew we hadn't gotten any new games for it recently, but there was no sense in me of it having been passed by or made obsolete, part of an irrevocable past. I didn't pay homage, but rather played and enjoyed as I always did these familiar companions that I would play cyclically.

Then one day that changed. I got home one December afternoon. Dad was home early, and of course Katie and Diana were home. I saw cow-print boxes with the words "Gateway" on them. In place of the Commodore was a new computer, with a larger monitor. The computer was larger too and stood up, rather than sitting flat under the monitor. There was a sleek, round mouse, a keyboard, but no joystick (we would soon get one). Dad was showing my sisters how to use the new computer. It had Myst, which Diana was tentatively playing (it's like at school, she said), and Monopoly like the old one my sisters and I played but with shinier graphics. Soon we would get the Internet and AOL. An era was beginning.

In contrast, the old computer, dear old Commodore, was put in its original box, shuffled off to the storage room between the den and the garage, to sit in darkness. The games were gone. They could no longer be played. A couple of instruction manuals kicked around for a while, reminders of the games, so recently friends, that had been lost. I would play those games again. One time, briefly, we hooked up the Commodore again for nostalgia's sake. For a few weeks I played the games. Then the disk drive closing mechanism broke. Now the games are available via emulation, but finding the games, getting the emulators to work, and mapping out the joystick to the keys isn't the same experience. An era was ending.

The change was necessary; the games I would play, the websites I would visit, the chat rooms I would chat in during the next few years became important too, and I can say that I wish there were more letters in the alphabet so I could talk about them all. But that doesn't make the past less important, even remembered through the skewing influence of nostalgia.

My Commodore introduced me to computers, to command prompts, to video games.

And I miss it.