Where were we?  Oh yes, I moved to a new town, got married and rented a very small but cozy house in the middle of nowhere.  We planted a vegetable garden, put up a clothesline, and I sold the pistol I had bought for $150 for nearly $300:

With that $300, I ordered this:

and this:

So at least now, I could save my work.  Along with those, I bought and borrowed from my Atari-loving friend a number of issues of Antic! (type in 8 pages of hex codes to play some cheesy little game) and some pretty amazing games.  This period likely established me as a hardcore PC gamer for life:

And at the end, I scored a 300baud modem, joined Atari BBS's, and uploaded as Public Domain software some games I had created, most memorable of which was Nuker!  Inspired by the movie The China Syndrome and the real-world events of Three Mile Island, Nuker! required the player to maintain the delicate balance of systems to operate a nuclear reactor safely while incorporating an economic model in which the player strove to make money.  Nuker! was written in Turbo Basic for Atari 8-bit and represented the culmination of my programming abilities on that platform.

Unfortunately, nothing remains to this date of the Nuker! source code or the game itself.

The years between my graduation in 1983 and my marriage in 1987 were marked by the death of my father three months before my graduation, and the shock of loss of income and general malaise and economic hangover from the Carter years and the early Reagan administration.  I was working between 30 and 40 hours a week at $3.15 (minimum wage) without many prospects.  I applied for factory jobs but without connections you couldn't get an interview.  I explored selling life insurance, working at Home Depot and Steven's grocery chain in Nashville (a relocation I couldn't afford).  And I smoked a lot of pot.

Video arcades imploded, but I did get a couple of chances to play with computers.  During a weeklong stay with my uncle in Nashville, I was exposed to his TRS-80 Color Computer II.  Among other things, I wrote a stock-market trading game that was destined to remain undiscovered by the public on his tape drive.  Remember, this was before the era of bulletin boards even.

Also, when the Atari 130XE came out around '85, a friend who was passionately into Atari bought one and loaned me his 800XL.  It had no storage medium, so my 20-year-old self would stay up all night in my room writing games (mostly stock market trading games) only to shut the power off around 4AM and lose all my work, starting over again the next night.  My monitor of choce:  a very small GE black-and-white television, on which I also watched shows on the brand-new HBO and MTV channels.

Broke, spending all my $110/week paycheck on pot ($25/quarter), beer ($3/6pack), and cigarettes ($6/carton) and gas ($1/gallon), I virtually abandoned computers and videogames for the next couple of years, spending what little disposable income I had on guns like this one:

  Then, in 1987, I got married.

Sometime when I was around 15 or 16, a wonderful thing happened.  Videogames started to proliferate, and the country entered the age of the video arcade.  My friends and I dumped countless quarters into:

And my personal favorite...

It wasn't long till one of our gang ended up with one of these for Christmas and a tiny little color TV in his room:

We saved a lot of quarters after that.  And this was my first real exposure to a game console.  Why didn't I buy one of my own, you ask?  Well, I had just turned 16, had a job and a car, and had just discovered girls. Girls seemed to prefer to be taken out to video arcades instead of hunkering around a tiny color TV in a guy's friend's room.

Obsessed with all things electronic, a subscriber to Popular Electronics, crafter of circuits with my soldering iron and parts sourced from the local Radio Shack, I continued the pursuit of my life's dream.  I'm not sure what that dream actually was, but I think involved the construction of a working phaser.  Anyway, my weekly trips to Radio Shack to spend hours browsing the solid state parts section eventually led me to discover this sometime in 1978:

At $600 in 1978 dollars, roughly a month of my parents' salary in an era when my mom only worked every other week due to the poor economy, there was no way I was getting one of my own.  What they did buy me, though, was the manual, which I still have to this day:

I would argue this is still one of the best introductions to programming ever written, especially from the perspective of inspiring young boys.  I spent hours and hours hanging out in the local Radio Shack, writing BASIC programs on paper at home and typing them in at the store.  And thus was born my first game, Tic Tac Toe - complete with AI.

The Pong craze hit.  As a 7 year old only child way before the Internet, the highlight of the Christmas season was getting the Sears Toy Catalog and marking everything I wanted Santa to bring.  Since I was a geek-in-training, I also salivated over the Radio Shack catalog.  Sometime around 1977, my parents gave in and bought me this for Christmas:

Christmas came, I opened it, and rushed to hook it up to the RCA color TV we had recently bought.  I turned it on... and it caught the curtains behind the TV on fire!  Back to Radio Shack it went for a refund, and I went back to feeding quarters into the Pong machine at the Blue Bird Cafe.

The purpose of this blog is to explore the games that have impressed me, influenced me, and shaped my life - all in chronological order.  So let's get started!

Atari began selling Pong machines November 29, 1972.  I was 7 years old.  I went to church on Sunday morning with my parents in Pulaski, TN (the church is still there... East Hill Church of Christ).  Every Sunday after church, we would go have lunch at the Blue Bird cafe (also still there).  My memory is that the burgers, beef stew, and open-faced roast beef sandwiches were amazing.  When my parents were paying at the register up front, I remember playing 45's on the jukebox.  But one day, sometime when I was 7 or 8 years old, they got this wondrous new woodgrain and yellow machine.  I was hooked.