Dedication to 8 Bit

I think one of the reason I'm not fabulously wealthy or famous is that I lack a certain level of dedication and commitment to a project. Here is an example of what I am talking about.

The Great Egg Hunt of 2011

When I finally caught up, life seems to have passed me by.

It's seven in the evening the day before Easter. The sun still barely hangs in the sky. Tomorrow, we head over to my father's house for another Easter Sunday and my daughter who is excited about the whole egg hunt will probably be a little less interested next year and maybe just half-heatedly into it the year after.

And this is it. This is the crescendo of the child years. This is me being a kid for a second time in my life. The last real Easter. Maybe, I should tie a string around the hinge of my den door so that when I pass it I'll remember this day - the day before the egg hunt.

I'll soon forget about the string and years later when I'm moving out of this house or maybe when I'm packing up the Maddie's things, I'll see the string and think of this day and this moment.

Things are far from perfect, but they're good enough. Good enough to remember this point - if life were a video game, I'd save it right here even with all the mistakes and missed bonuses. This level is worth playing again.

Tomorrow is the great the hunt and the candy and prizes and eating together and then it will be over and all that will be left is that string tied to the hinge of the door to my den.

Old Gamers Never Die

I'm an old gamer. So old in fact, I was there at the very start of video and computer games. I played Pong and Space Wars in the pinball arcades. I owned an Apple IIe, an Atari 2600, and even a cherry red Famicom.

It's kind of sad that the history of video game development in Las Vegas has mostly been forgotten. Hardly anyone now-a-days realizes that at least two major video game genres originated in Las Vegas. The inklings of modern day FPS (First Person Shooters) and RTS (Real-Time Strategies) were developed in Las Vegas and I make the argument that flight simulators got their start here with an old PC game called DragonStrike.

Back in the early 80's there were three high schools in Las Vegas that had advanced computer programming and math labs: Bonanza, Clark and Western. It started around 1980 before there were any PC's in schools. I call it the "Univac Wars". Students from each high school spent hours trying to hack into the school district's Univac system and take down the other school's access. A few student were also creating ascii-text games on the system.

There was no real sense of security back then. You have to remember enthusiasm for computers in the 80's was about the same as it is now for say, ham radios. No one cared .. and unlike today, the math teachers who ran the labs had almost free rein to do whatever they wanted. It was beautiful.

Mr. V who ran Bonanza's computer lab and taught calculus was a disgruntled Vietnam vet. He basically let us do whatever we wanted, unless it was illegal with the computers. Mr. V even had his own school club. The club met once a year for the school picture and everyone was vice president unless they didn't want to be. It was called the Bonanza Sophistic and Rhetoric Society - The BSeRS. The BSeRS even had a Homecoming float. It was an green painted plank with brown balloons stacked in a pile with a student wearing bull horns sitting on top of the balloons.

If you're wondering where all the creativity and engineering talent has gone, then look no further than the security and procedural mandates of schools. When a kid can get expelled for installing a second OS - Linux or detention for downloading Firefox onto a school computer, you know the days of innovation are over.

In 1982, Bonanza got it's first Apple II and it had one program on it called Lemonade Stand. It wasn't long before all of the dudes had the latest in Apple games like: Wolfenstien, Apple Maniacs and Choplifter. There was also a huge desire to program your own game and out do each other in game play and sophistication.

These programmers and math geeks from these three high schools eventually combined together to form Westwood Associates.

More on Westwood in the next post.

Interesting look at the history of games
Play some of those classic games - The Vault