80s News Today

The March issue of Computer & Video Games arrived on newsstands in the early spring of 1983 like a cold wind slipping under the door of an old house you thought was safely locked. It was Issue 17, and on the cover—God help us—was Tom Baker's face, that long, watchful face of The Real Doctor Who, with the eyes that seemed to know too much, staring out from under the famous scarf as though he'd just stepped out of the shadows of a BBC corridor and into our world. The magazine smelled of fresh ink and cheap paper, the kind that yellows and brittles if you leave it too long in the attic. Kids flipped through it in ComputerLand and Waldenbooks, hearts beating a little faster because something impossible had happened. Buried inside, there it was: three full pages of BASIC code. Not a review. Not a screenshot (there were none to take). Just lines and lines of numbered statements, REMarks, GOTOs, and PRINTs that promised to summon something called Doctor Who: The Adventure onto yo...

A very small thing happened to a great many people on March 5, 1981, and it was called the Sinclair ZX81 . The ZX81 was a computer that consisted almost entirely of Nothing. It had four chips. Not four hundred, not four thousand. Four. If you opened the casing, you’d find a vast, echoing plastic cavern that suggested the computer was actually just a very expensive place for a spider to raise a family. It came with one kilobyte of RAM. To put that into perspective for the modern reader (who likely has more computing power in their electric toothbrush than existed on the entire planet in 1954), one kilobyte is roughly the amount of memory required to remember a medium-sized grocery list, provided you don't buy any exotic cheeses with long names. And yet, it was magnificent. Or, at least, it looked magnificent in glossy magazine ads. It was a sleek, black wedge of plastic that looked like it had been fallen off the back of a passing UFO. It didn't have a keyboard so much as a ...

Benny Hill was one of many British cultural phenomenons to cross the Atlantic during the 1980s. But while TV viewers on this side of the pond were limited to wondering if Mr. Hill and Ozzy Osbourne had ever been seen together in the same room, Brits were busy becoming the ribald scamp via their home computers. On March 1, 1986, Benny Hill's Madcap Chase began to play out on the ZX Spectrum.  While the game begins with a photo-realistic scanned image of the comedian, the surprisingly large sprite of Mr. Hill players controlled looked more like Austin Powers when scrolling sideways - a remarkable feat, given that the swinging spy character wouldn't even be conceived of for another five years. Only when he turns to face the camera is he somewhat recognizable, chiefly on the basis of his desperate grin and granny glasses, and the aura of impending disaster that surrounds him like cheap aftershave. Benny lopes along with a gait that suggests both unholy enthusiasm and imminent card...

In the brisk February of 1988, the Atari computer owners of Britain discovered a small, digital miracle called Henry’s House . Now, the Atari 8-bit family was, by 1988, a bit like a venerable old relative who insists on wearing a tuxedo to a backyard barbecue—charming, surprisingly capable, but everyone suspected their time was nearly up. Yet, into this sunset period stepped young Henry. The premise of Henry’s House is one of those things that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room with a damp cloth over your eyes. It is a platform game about Prince Harry of Wales. Yes, that Prince Harry. The one who, at the time, was a toddler whose primary achievements involved being third in line to a very large throne and occasionally wearing adorable jumpers. The reception, dear reader, was not merely positive. It was glowing. Magazines that normally reserved their highest praise for things like "slightly less flickery than last month’s offering" suddenly found themselves reachin...

Dateline: February 21, 1980. Columbus, Ohio. (Where else?) In the heart of the great American boredom, in a sleek, air-conditioned corporate bunker of polished steel and beige carpeting, the pioneering dial-up online service CompuServe flipped a switch. Click. And just like that, the universe cracked open! They called it the "CB Simulator." Hah! "Citizen's Band Simulator." Can you feel the mid-century corporate desperate-for-relevance clinging to that name? Like calling a spacesuit a "very fancy raincoat." They were trying to capture the raw, screeching energy of the CB radio, that great diesel-fumed trucker opera of the 1970s. But this wasn't 10-4, good buddy, on the I-95. This was something else entirely. This was the future, man. This was 300-baud acoustic couplers mating with Ma Bell’s lines in a screech that sounded like two tomcats being electrocuted in a tin can. This was phosphor-green letters crawling across your $2,000 CRT like divine r...

February 13, 1983: The air thick with Reagan's morning-in-America optimism, but down in the streets—zoom! crash! bang!—the ghosts of the 1970s still haunted every corner, every alleyway, every flickering TV screen blaring out the nightly news of muggings, burglaries, and that endless, soul-sucking crime wave that had Americans locking their doors triple-time and dreaming of vigilante justice. The Me Decade? Ha! More like the Mugger Decade, the decade where soft-on-crime judges let the perps walk with a slap on the wrist, where urban decay spread like some psychedelic fungus from Haight-Ashbury to Hackensack and the homicide rate doubled—doubled!—between 1960 and 1980, violent crimes tripling like a bad acid trip gone national. The American Citizen—that beleaguered creature of the suburban sprawl—is tired. Tired of the muggers, tired of the squeegee men, tired of the "social rehabilitators" who looked at a street thug and saw a misunderstood poet. They wanted order. They w...

January 24, 1984—Cupertino, California, the Flint Center at De Anza College crackling like a Van de Graaff generator in a mad scientist's lab! The air thick with the scent of revolution, shareholders fidgeting in their pinstripes, tech whiz kids slouched in denim, all eyes glued to the stage where the wizard himself, Steve Jobs, twenty-eight years old and burning like a supernova, steps out under the lights, beaming that Cheshire cat grin, that knowing smirk that says, I've got the future in my pocket, folks, and it's about to bite Big Blue right on the ass! He stood there, a maestro before his orchestra, a palpable energy radiating from him like heat from a nuclear reactor. This was a showman, not a salesman. A showman who understood that in the arena of commerce, style was substance and presentation was a sacrament. He moved with the predatory grace of a cougar, pacing, pausing, his voice a mesmerizing instrument, rising and falling, a sermon in the church of Silicon Vall...

Let's talk about one of the most iconic moments in advertising history—the Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad . You remember it, right? That dystopian masterpiece directed by Ridley Scott, straight out of George Orwell's nightmare. A gray, soulless world where rows of drone-like workers stare blankly at a massive screen, listening to some authoritarian figure droning on about conformity and control. Then, in bursts this athletic woman in bright red shorts, hurling a sledgehammer right through the screen, shattering the illusion. "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh," the voiceover declares. "And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'" It was genius. Pure, unadulterated marketing brilliance. Back then, Apple was the plucky underdog, positioning itself as the liberator against the evil empire of IBM. The IBM PC was the corporate behemoth—clunky, bureaucratic, designed for suits in boardrooms who wanted everything standardized, con...

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the British Broadcasting Corporation is for and why it exists, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened, and it resulted in a television program called The Computer Programme . On a cold Monday in January 1982—specifically the 11th, a day generally reserved for the nursing of mild hangovers and the profound realization that winter is quite long—the British public was introduced to a machine that looked like a very expensive, very sophisticated biscuit tin. This was the BBC Micro. The first episode of The Computer Programme featured Chris Serle, a man who possessed the heroic level of bewilderment required to represent an entire nation that still thought "software" was a type of comfortable knitwear. Alongside him was Ian McNaught-Davis, who explained the digital revolution with the kin...

Do you see them? These are the new wizards, the digital alchemists of Access Software out in the suburban sprawl of Salt Lake City. And what have they conjured up for the winter of 1984? They call it Raid Over Moscow. Picture the scene: It is January. The sky is the color of a bruised plum. In every split-level ranch from Levittown to Palo Alto, the Commodore 64—that beige breadbox of destiny, that 64-kilobyte marvel of the New Era—groans with the weight of the Apocalypse. And there it is on the screen! The Great Bear itself! The USSR! Only they aren't playing fair, are they? The storyline tells us the U.S. has dismantled its nukes—The Great Disarmament!—and now the Soviets, those "deceitful aggressors," have launched a sneak attack! Your mission? Not just to defend, but to STRIKE BACK!  You aren't just a boy in a striped velour shirt anymore. You are a Stealth Pilot! You guide your craft out of the hangar—taps, nudges, frantic stick-wiggling—trying not to scrape the ...

Ah, Las Vegas in January...the neon still humming from New Year's hangovers, the slot machines clinking like nervous teeth, the desert wind whipping through the convention center parking lot where the big rigs unload their cargo of tomorrow's gadgets. And there, amid the polyester suits and the badge-lanyards swinging like pendulums of ambition, at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, something electric was about to happen. Not just electric—zap! pow!—the kind of jolt that rewires the brain of an entire industry. Enter Jack Tramiel. Picture him: the Holocaust survivor turned typewriter king turned calculator warrior, now the emperor of Commodore International, striding the show floor with that Eastern European intensity, eyes like laser beams scanning for weakness in the competition. Tramiel, the man who once nearly went bankrupt battling Texas Instruments in the calculator wars and vowed revenge—"business is war," he liked to say—had been plotting this moment for mo...

There it was. The Click-Clack-Zzzzzzt of the cassette drive, a sound like a swarm of electric locusts devouring a silicon harvest. It was January 6, 1980, and the Great Gods of Avalon Hill had just handed the American suburbanite the ultimate status symbol: the power to vaporize Moscow from the comfort of a swivel chair. There it was, gentlemen, in the crisp winter light of a new decade, slipping quietly into the world like a sleek, variable-swept-wing bomber emerging from the hangar: B-1 Nuclear Bomber , released for the Apple II. No fanfare, no ticker-tape parade down Silicon Valley's nascent boulevards—just a cassette tape or floppy disk in a box, priced for the serious enthusiast, arriving at computer shops and hobby stores where the new breed of masters of the universe gathered. B-1 Nuclear Bomber was not, emphatically not, a game for the casual Atari-paddle-wielding plebeian. Oh no. This was a Serious Simulation, a high-fidelity, low-resolution plunge into the heart of the ul...

In the cold grip of winter, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth moon in the year we mortals reckon as 1984, a new power stirred in the realm of Fairyland—no, not in the ancient lands of song and saga, but in the flickering glow of the NEC PC-8801, that strange artifact of the Rising Sun's ingenuity. It was there, in the hidden workshops of T&E Soft, that Tokihiro Naito, a young visionary not unlike a wizard forging spells from forbidden tomes, unleashed Hydlide upon an unsuspecting world. It was a quiet beginning, a single seed planted in the fertile ground of Japanese computing. Yet from this humble release date of December 13, 1984, a legacy grew, one that would eventually cross the Vast Sea to foreign shores. A million copies were sold, a testament to the hunger for new tales of heroism. One day, the tales of Hydlide would be told in the West, on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Saturn. But before this could come to pass, a hero had to emerge in Fairyland during ...

Human beings are different. They care about timing. In December, they care especially about presents, overcooked turkey, and the curious phenomenon of a jolly, red-suited man defying several fundamental laws of physics. And so, somewhere between worrying about Aunt Enid’s pudding and the precise location of the batteries for a talking doll, a software house known as Activision decided the time was now. Knightmare arrived for the Commodore 64, not with the fiery majesty of a collapsing sun, but with a quiet, plastic rustle. Now, for those unfamiliar with the labyrinthine joys of British television in the late eighties, Knightmare was not just a game. Oh no. It was, in its original televised form, an experience. A glorious, utterly bonkers spectacle involving a blindfolded child, a giant, talking disembodied head, and a series of dungeon rooms that looked suspiciously like someone's garage after a particularly ambitious theatrical clear-out. The goal? To guide the blindfolded child...

Pull up a chair by the dying embers of the fireplace, because we're about to talk about a little something that slithered out from under a white house in December of 1980, a little something called Zork I: The Great Underground Empire . Or, at least it was great. Now this abandoned subterranean imperial realm was yours for the taking on your TRS-80 home computer, courtesy of RadioShack.  You’re eight, maybe nine, and it’s a Friday night in a suburban tract home where the snow is already knee-deep and the wind sounds like something trying to get in sideways. Your parents are downstairs watching The Love Boat or whatever the hell passes for entertainment when you’re born before color TV. Up in your room, the only light comes from the green glow of a TRS-80 Model I, its fan humming like a dying June bug trapped in a mason jar. Two guys in a lab at MIT had basically built their own private haunted house out of words. And now you're sliding it into the Trash 80: a floppy disk, thi...

November 26, 1987 Somewhere in the Kingdom of Kroz – Level 28, I think Today I descended into what an eccentric software executive-turned-hermit has told me is called the Kingdom of Kroz . He babbled something about a Magical Amulet that controls reality itself, hidden at the bottom of an endless maze of whips, gems, and creatures that look like they were drawn by a sadistic kindergarteners with a grudge. The entrance was a nondescript stone door behind a 7-Eleven in Garland, Texas. One minute I’m reaching for a Big Bite hot dog on the rollers, the next I’m falling fifty feet into a pit that smells faintly of ozone and broken dreams. My fedora stayed on. Of course it did. I've been on the trail of the Magical Amulet of Kroz for three years, following cryptic hints left by that rascal Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software. Miller claimed the amulet grants true wisdom, but all it seems to grant so far is a nasty habit of running into monsters resembling umlaut-crowned vowels and h...

You ever smell a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A when it’s been running too long? That hot-plastic, cheap-capacitor stink that sneaks out of the vents like robots dying behind the walls. During the Christmas season of 1980, that odor hung over half the dens in America, because something had just woken up inside those beige coffins. Something hungry. Something that had been sleeping since the caves of mainframes past. They called it Hunt the Wumpus . A different kind of darkness was stirring. A primal one. A necessary one. The Wumpus was loose, and it wanted a piece of your soul, or at least a few hours of your time. Texas Instruments, bless their cold, calculating hearts, decided to bring the horror home. The original game, a text-based thing made of words and imagination, had been kicking around on big, clunky university computers since '73. It was pure dread, conjured in the mind. But this, this new beast on the TI-99/4A computer, it had pictures. It had color. It had sound. And in th...

It was November 1989, a time when the Berlin Wall was doing its level best to become a rather fetching pile of souvenirs, George Bush the Elder was discovering that being President is marginally less fun than reading the fine print on a nuclear disarmament treaty, and the Commodore 64, that beige breadbin of dreams, was quietly preparing to traumatize an entire generation of Westerners who thought “Survival Horror” was something that happened to other people in Japanese games they couldn’t afford to import. Somewhere, in the bustling, slightly seedy underbelly of the computer gaming industry, a little company called Dynamix decided it was time to unleash something truly...unsettling upon the unsuspecting Commodore 64-owning populace. They called it Project Firestart . And oh, the sheer, unadulterated hubris of such a title. A "project," as if it were a particularly ambitious attempt at knitting a scarf for a very large, many-necked alien. "Firestart," which sounds l...

I sing of arms and the man…no, wrong epic. I sing of cursors and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, who suddenly found himself clutching a plastic rodent, and staring into the glowing rectangle that promised to civilize him.  It was forty years ago today that Microsoft loosed upon an unsuspecting world something called Windows 1.0 . Not an operating system, mind you. Heavens no. That would come later, when the accountants and the lawyers had properly sanctified the theft. This was merely an "operating environment," atop the squat, utilitarian MS-DOS operating system. No longer would the American office worker be forced to endure the brutal, East German austerity of one full-screen program at a time. No! Now he could run a spreadsheet and a word processor simultaneously, watching them slide over one another, in a phenomenon known as "overlapping windows." And a new interfacing device, the mouse, would replace typing and keyboards with another innovation: "point a...

"Sabrina dies at dawn!" It's scary enough wandering through the primeval woods of Transylvania in the dead of night, but then you come across a wrinkled piece of paper on the forest floor upon which these words are written. The date must surely be November of 1982, and the horror unfolding before you is courtesy of Penguin Software's chilling graphic adventure, Transylvania. Facing all that goes bump in the night in this land of superstition and morbid enchantment, you must rescue the Princess Sabrina, who is currently being held prisoner in a sealed coffin in the tower of Dracula's castle. Would you dare descend into the darkened cellar of a house bearing the uber-lucky number 13? Sure, there was a hearty loaf of white bread on the first floor, and a flintlock pistol. But the latter could use a silver bullet, as you're being doggedly pursued by a demon-eyed werewolf. Too bad that you'll have to retrieve the projectile from the inside of a coffin occupied ...