FAN: Still A Fan, The Early Years IX

This is Christmas 1982 so I was a fresh 14 years old. Ahhh, my Atari 2600, sigh. The hours I spent with this machine. The first game machine we had was one of the very early Pongs that came with a Magnavox TV. It was black and orange and had 2 paddles, both with wheels on them. There may have been a button as well, I can't remember. It said on the back of the picture that for Christmas I received the stand (not Atari but aftermarket), and ET the game, Megamaniac (by Activision) and a baseball game. Have I mentioned that carpet before? I have? Ok, I'll stop. Slightly embarrassing to admit, but I recently bought a French Blue T-Shirt with the Atari Logo on it from thinkgeek.com. I get rave reviews when I wear it.
Much like I stated in an earlier "The Early Years", I started developing my game at a young age..lol. Even though I was in my awkward years here at 14, I was swimming in the family pool with the hottie neighbor who was a year older than me - so 15 here at the time. Hanging out with neighborhood girls allowed me to gain comfort when talking to girls later instead of having paralysis by analysis. That and I liked it when we braided each other's hair and painted each other's toenails. Ok, that was totally a joke. I was - and still am - all about the honeys. I don't think I came out of my awkward lanky look for a few more years though. Maybe by TEY XI.
This was the first day of school in 1983 and I'm rockin' the Angus Young shirt. I got this from the kiosk in the mall with the 100's of transfers to sift through and then you picked your T-Shirt color and they slapped it on there. Almost comical that my hair there would kind of pass for a 14 year old today. Just let it grow long and don't really do anything with it.
This is around Halloween 1983. It's before Still A Dad redid our kitchen as I barely remember it like this. Well, we haven't owned the house since like 1992 so I barely remember it at all. First, notice the Phillies hat. It's 4 years after We Are Family and I was a Phillies fan already. People that live out here now don't believe me when I tell them that. That's "Harry", a dummy a friend and I made. It's a funny story really. I remembered being at my cousin's house once and he and his friends made a dummy that came down a staircase on a line when the door was opened. They were all engineer types too and it was pretty cool. My bedroom window looked out onto old train tracks which were elevated to about the same height as my bedroom window.

Our plan was to put Harry on a pulley and put a line from my room out to the railing alongside the tracks. When someone was walking down our alley, we would pull Harry on the line and he would scare the walkers! Well, we couldn't get the line tied tight enough to hold the weight and one time he actually broke the line during a test and fell in the pool cover.

We didn't want anyone to know we were working on this plan so we hid him in our basement. We put him in our "cold room" and sat him in an old highchair. My mom kept our Hi-C drink boxes in this cold room. On this particular morning she ran out of drink boxes in the fridge and needed some for packing lunches so down to the cold room she went.

I was sleeping when a loud scream woke me up. Mom went in the room, got the drink boxes, and when she turned around to leave the room a dummy the size of me was sitting in the chair looking at her. I never meant to scare anyone, I was just hiding it, but it was a great story to tell for a long time after it happened.

This was my 15th birthday and I got Metal Health by Quiot Riot, from my GRANDMOTHER! My Grandma on Still A Dad's side of the family was so cool. She would ask me to write down what I wanted and then on Senior Citizen's day at the mall she would go and buy it. Can you imagine a grandma in National Record Mart going up to the register with that LP cover? She bought my Atari console and most of my games for me there because she got a 10% discount or something. I would give her my money and she would buy my merchandise. Nice system.
This is me shortly after my birthday. I used my birthday money and some paper route money to buy my first PC, a TI-99/4a. Check out the tape drive! I didn't own a disk drive until I bought a Commodore-64. The same cousin who inspired me to make the dummy inspired me to buy a PC. He had a Trash80 and I loved going over to play games on it. The US invaded Grenada in 1983 and one of the first computer programs I ever wrote was a war game called "Camp Grenada". I made an intro screen and everything - complete with the song "Hello Mother, Hello Father" beeping one note at a time. The game was simple enough but when I go back and think that I wrote a simple video game at age 15 I only wish to God I could get my hands on it somehow.

It made use of sprites for those in the know. The tank (you) started in the first column of the screen in the middle. Moving the joystick in any direction would add 1 or subtract 1 from the row,column you were in. Pressing the Fire button created another sprite which was a missile at the tank location plus 1 column, same row. It then moved to column + 1 every half second or something. I had sprite trees and sprite enemy tanks which moved at random and if the missile sprite shared the same column, row as an enemy tank sprite a Batman "POW" type thing was displayed and the tank disappeared and you got points. Me making that game allowed me to think about what the code was doing on every video game I've played since. I can't even begin to imagine how complex it is programming a Wii remote with the Sports Resort add on compared to a stick and a button!