My personal home gaming history started with a TI99-4a and an Intellivision, but around 1985 my parents bought me an Apple IIc. That really made things fun and changed the dynamic, because most of my friends had Apple-related computers, and they were at my school as well. Dave, Dwight, Jeremy, I, and others would regularly get together at various homes and copy floppies for hours at a time, plus we would try out the latest products that came in at Babbage’s. Ah yes, Babbage’s, a great job that had the extra benefit the manager considered “product research.” See, as long as there were several copies of a particular game currently in stock, we could borrow one of them and take it home to play it, to learn about the game so that we could answer questions for customers and do a better job selling it. Oh yes, dear readers: We absolutely did this, and with the help of Copy ][+ we could, ah, “extend” our product research time indefinitely, all while returning the games to the store on our next shift, shrink wrapping them up, and putting them back on the sales floor.
We’re Old School Gamer, so of course every issue is a blast from the past, but this one really hit home for me. Reading about the experiences we all had on in parallel on Commodore, Atari and Apple computers across the country really highlighted how fantastic gaming in an 8-bit world was. Enjoy the memories we will bring back with this issue, along with all the other columns and articles we have put together for you here in Issue #48!
Ryan Burger - Old School Gamer Publisher, Old School Gamer
