Commodore 64 Arm Wrestling 0 ->
Arm Wrestle with your keyboard until it breaks!
My first programmable computer was an ATARI 400. It came with a cartridge called BASIC and a manual full of with cool things that you could program. It was an amazing, mesmerizing machine. One of my favorite programs was “Delta Drawing”, a turtle drawing application. The 400 was great, but one time I lost a very elaborate drawing because someone turned off the machine and was heartbroken. I wanted a computer that could store things so I wouldn’t lose my work.
My mom searched the For Sale section of the newspaper for a few months until she came across a person selling a Commodore 64. It was an older gentleman who had decided to upgrade to the C-128 and was happy to spend some time to teach me how the C64 worked as part of the sale. I remember him visiting our house and setting it up. I remember panicking and running out of the room when he said that I can’t have powerful magnets near the computer because I had left a snap bracelet downstairs.
After spending a day with me to show me how the commodore worked, the old gentleman gave us all of his software that he had been collecting: two large caches full of disks and a box full of manuals. Either he didn’t realize that the C-128 could run C-64 software (doubtful), or he gave it to us out of generosity. It was better than Christmas.
The Commodore-64 was an amazing machine. The computer was built into the keyboard, and it included a monitor and disk drive. Optionally, one could buy a tape drive for significantly more storage (but with atrocious I/O speeds), joysticks, and other peripherals. It also came with an awesome manual that had great explanations and many programming exercises.
When you turned on the C-64, you were greeted with a BASIC interpreter prompt:
The previous owner had purchased many interactive fiction games, such as “Essex”, and “Amnesia”. Essex in particular had a grip on me. The manual was 121 pages, the majority of which was the opening chapters of a novel explaining the characters with beautifully designed, hand-drawn artwork every few pages. Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, so my mother relied on random people in the phonebook to help me out. English isn’t my parents’ native language, and my mom did not want me to have an Italian accent. Showing astounding resourcefulness, she decided to cold-call random phone numbers in the phone book and ask them to pronounce words or define them for me. Several people were more than happy to help and became regulars. With the help of these strangers I was able to win the Ontario provincial spelling bee later that year.
With the manual understood, I booted up the game. Picking up exactly where the manual left off, but then being able to enter commands and change the story, was an incredible feeling. The game seemed to understand everything I could type. The tour guide, Tiny Ed, Kaxalgazmurithar the Fraxulian Alien, they were all there! I could ask them questions about what they said in the novel. At one point I told Kaxal that he was a great friend and he thanked me for the compliment. This wasn’t part of the game plot, but I genuinely found Kaxal to be kind and thought he deserved a compliment. The tour guide led us through the ship and, near the end of the tour, the ship exploded and we all died, game over.
I played Essex many times (you can play the DOS version here https://www.myabandonware.com/game/essex-5t/play-5t using the manual from here: https://archive.org/details/Essex/page/n57/mode/2up). I could never figure out how to keep the ship from blowing up, or even how to advance the plot an inch, but this didn’t matter back then. I was captivated by the character and scenery of the ship. I was occasionally trying to figure out who was blowing up the ship, but I wasn’t frustrated that I had made no progress. This is a sharp contrast to today, where I gave up after about sixty minutes of playtime and resorted to reading a walkthrough online, and then gave up on the walkthrough because the game is too random for the walkthrough to be consistent. We get frustrated at our vintage games because we forgot what it’s like to play them as a kid. As a kid, I loved the metaphors and would spend ages thinking about them, “Tiny Ed is underfoot”, or “In the gym, you can hear people injuring themselves in the name of good health”. Playing Essex today with the memories of my original playthrough reminds me to stop and smell the roses. Sometimes I get frustrated at my kids because I forgot what it’s like to be a kid.
Beyond playing the games and running the programs that came with my Commodore, I also enjoyed writing programs and saving them to the giant floppy disks. I made text adventures, a maze game, a program that drew your name all over the screen, and my most popular game: Commodore Arm Wrestling.
Commodore Arm Wrestling was a simple game where you had to hit the spacebar X times per second. If you were able to hit it at least X times, you started winning the match, as shown by an ASCII-art drawing that refreshed every second. After enough seconds of winning, you won the entire match and entered a new match with the next opponent, who required X+1 times. This kept going until you couldn’t press the space bar fast enough. I played it a few times, but it got old quickly.
What I didn’t realize was that other people would play the game expecting to reach “the end” and get some reward. Or that my cousins would compete to get to the strongest opponent. This gave them incentive to get better and better. At some point after I got my C64, my cousin Kevin also got one. I brought my Arm Wrestling game to his house and he asked to keep it. A few weeks later, I found out that him and his brother had broken the space bar on the keyboard, putting his commodore into the infirmary. By this time, I think we were upgrading to IBMs anyways. So we can call Commodore Arm Wrestling a smashing success.
The Good
Like so many others, these early machines and the people who created content for them, captivated me and shaped my life in so many profound ways. I’ll be eternally grateful for their dedication.
The Bad
I remember my Uncle Joe coming into Kevin’s room multiple times and yelling at us that we were going to break the keyboard by pounding on the space bar. We thought that there was no way the space bar would break: it’s the biggest key on the keyboard! Being a parent is hard.
The Ugly
Many years later, my dad threw my Atari in the garbage. My children won’t be able to inherit that machine with 32 kb RAM and the ketchup smell. R.I.P. ATARI 400.
The Takeaway
It’s difficult to make something that provides more hours of entertainment than it cost to build. Take movies for example, which require thousands of hours of labor to produce 90 minutes of content. Of course a single movie entertains many people. But still, Arm Wrestling took a about an hour to program and provided my cousins over ten times as many hours of entertainment. There’s something magical about that, and I am certain that the mechanical leverage of fun is made so much more higher with computers.