This might be an odd article to have for my debut on Cortex, but it is what came to mind when I looked at the blank screen so here we go. Now, you might think that this will be a twist, like I'll start talking about Secret of Monkey Island being my first taste of video game piracy because it was a video game about piracy, but no, I am aiming for the literal this time. No clever play on words in this article title, I'm sorry to say.
No, this is a story of an eight year old boy-child who was happily trying to figure out to program Basic on his family's Apple IIGS. I remember that my dream program to own for the machine was LOGO, as that was what I had used on the Apple IIs back at my elementary school. My parents told me that it was too expensive, however, and my allowance wasn't really sizable enough to purchase it anytime soon.
I didn't fully appreciate the machine as being capable of playing video games, as I didn't really have any on it. My Atari 2600 was still the console that we turned to (we didn't have an NES at that point, though you best believe that was also on my wishlist). For me, the Apple computer was made for Carmen Sandiago, Oregon Trail, and LOGO. I had two of those, and I wanted the third.
I can't recall the time of year (though I know that it wasn't summer) nor the weather outside when my dad brought the discs home with him, but I do remember those glorious 5.25 inch bad boys. They both had a label taped to the top. On both labels were a series of names, "Conan the Barbarian", "Hard Hat Mac", and "Spy Hunter" are the three that still leap to mind, 33 years later. What my father had brought home were two discs filled with game executables for a bunch of early Apple games.
This is surprising for a number of reasons. The primary one was that my dad never took much of an interest in computer games. When he played games, he generally would play things like solitaire or casino games, and most of these hadn't even come out at that point. He didn't make the discs as he didn't have the know how to do so. What he did have, however, was a career where he worked with a large number of people who did have that skillset. That's right, he was a middle school PE teacher and coach. Scores of students attended his class every day, and he was incredibly well liked too. I have no idea how the conversation went, but one day, a student gave him those two discs as a gift (much better than the cliche apple a teacher normally receives).
I loved those discs for a long time. Suddenly, I had what felt like a multitude of new games to dive into. It also lead to me (my parents around the holidays and my birthday) buying actual games for the system, now that I could see what it was capable of. Mean 18, Skate or Die, and Bubble Bobble were all more polished and stronger games than most of the ones on the disc, and I loved all of them dearly too; however, I will never forget that completely random time a student gave my father two discs filled with computer games (aside from all of the details that I can no longer recall).
