Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 87: A history of the Apple II

Episode Date: February 20, 2017

It's the debut of Retronauts East as East Coast gaming experts Benj Edwards and Ben Elgin join Jeremy to discuss the Apple II computer platform: Its origins, its games, and its legacy. Be sure to visit our site, which includes a complete listing of this episode's musical selections and where to find them, at Retronauts.com. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way to help support this weekly show, please head on over to our Patreon page!

This weekend Retronauts, go east, young man. Hi, everyone, and welcome to Retronauts episode, I want to say 87, or if you want to call it Retronauts East, episode one, you can do that. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this is the first episode of Retronauts East, which is the new little splinter faction of the splinter cell of Retronauts. As part of our Patreon funding, we set a goal that said, you know, if we can get to a certain point, then we will go weekly and we will add some new show concepts to the schedule. And one of them was a recording set in where I live, as opposed to me having to fly to San Francisco to record, which gets kind of expensive, and I can't do that, like, every week.

So instead, we're recording here in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I have some native video game experts on hand. So why don't you guys introduce yourselves? I'm Benj Edwards. I'm a freelance journalist, and I've known Jeremy for a long time. We used to work together. Yeah, you contributed to a little bit of one up. You contributed to one-up back when I was there, laboring under the banner of Ziff Davis. Yeah. Yeah, and you are now...

I am still a journalist. I write for Fast Company, PC World, PCMag, the Atlantic sometimes. I focus on history of games and computers. And you have a personal site, too, don't you? Yeah, vintagecom. It's a blog I've run since 2005. You used to do, like, what, the scan of the week? Yeah, retro scan of the week, yeah, for 10 years, every Monday.

I guess in the age of Tumblr, there's not really much space for that. Yeah, yeah, probably became obsolete about five years ago. But you still post there quite a bit. Yeah, I do. It's kicking up a notch now because I did the Patreon thing too. Right, yeah, you want to talk about that? Yeah, sure. You can promote yourself here, why not?

Patreon.com slash Benj Edwards. It's going to fund deep looks into video game and computer history. I'm going to try to uncover things no one's ever written about before. And then after that, I'll talk about them on Retronauts. Nice. Can you give us any hints about what you're writing about, or do you want to maintain your specialness? I totally understand guarding that sort of thing. Because as soon you say, oh, yeah, I want to write about this, then someone else says,

oh, I should go do that first. The thing is also it gives people ideas, and they don't even realize they get the ideas because they just read it or hear it somewhere, and they're like, oh, I should. should do this or that. All right, you can keep it clandestined for now. Okay. That's fine. So we can all look forward to that.

When do you think your first article from that will hit? Right now, I am editing an interview with Ed Smith that I did last year, and he was the creator of the APF MP 1000 console, which was a really obscure 1970s cartridge-based console. I don't know if I've heard of it, yeah. Yeah, well, it was very notable because he's one of the few African-American video game pioneers in the industry, one of like two or three that I know of from that era. Right. And unfortunately, Jerry Lawson passed away a few years ago, so you can't really talk to him anymore. So basically everything that's known about him is out there, kind of like, you know, Satorio you want.

Everything is based on my interview I did with him in 2009. Yeah. Like everything. And then, Ben, what about yourself? Hey, so my name is Ben Elton. I'm not any kind of vintage expert like Bench here. My main qualification is that I'm as old as Jeremy, so I grew up with this stuff. I am a programmer, though.

I've been doing programming with a focus on computer graphics for a long time. Went to grad school for that. So I may have some of that angle to contribute. And, yeah, just I hadn't worked with a lot of these old systems as I was growing up. So hopefully we'll be able to tell you something interesting about them. Yeah, and I think the first interaction I remember having with you, was after I wrote a, like I know I've seen your name around online before this, but back when I wrote a retrospective on Adventure for Atari 2,600, and apparently you worked with Warren

Robinette and showed it to him, and we're like, so what do you think about this? Right, yeah, so this is basically a complete coincidence, but I shared an office with Warren Robinette, who was at Atari and who was basically this whole programmer behind Adventure, just because we were doing a little startup company and we had extra office space and we rented it to him was basically how that happened. So he was working on some other educational software products I think maybe with Broderburn, but I'm not sure at that time.

So yeah, and he really appreciated the interest in his older work. That was the one where he had the Easter egg of his name if you could pick up a specific pixel with your little avatar and bring it to the right room, which was one of the first Easter eggs ever. So that was a lot of fun. But yeah, and I've been following your stuff, Jeremy, since, I don't know, GeoCities. That's a long time ago. I remember a strider splash page.

That was. Yeah, back in a day, the on Toasty Frog. Before you had to just jump right in to the websites. I think that qualifies you to be here sharing it with the porn robinette. Yeah, definitely. Didn't he do Rocky's boots, that educational game that was highly inflamed? Yeah, he worked through a series of different educational games. This is, as I said, the debut episode of Retronauts East, which we're just numbering, you know, like a normal Retronauts episode.

So you'll have to please forgive any awkwardness or weirdness with this episode. We're still figuring out the recording situation. I don't have all the cables that I quite need in place. We're all in shock at what we look like in person's first time. That end, we're trying out a recording space that may not. be the right recording space. It's actually open. What's that? Cavern. Yeah. So, you know, when we do the Colossal Cave Adventure episode, that'll be perfect.

But for the moment, the audio on this may be below par. So if that's the case, then we'll retool things for next time. So bear with us. But hopefully the conversation will be good enough that you won't mind. We may hit Colossal Cave in this one at some point. Adventure is on here. Yeah. The support is it on the list. Cave isn't. Is it? But Advent

came out of that same work. It did. It did. But we don't want to get too bogged out of details. So, yeah, with that, why don't we move into this week's topic? So to kick off the first episode of Retronauts East, what I'd really like to do with this group and, you know, other people that I might bring in for recording, depending on, you know, expertise and everything, is touch on topics that. we don't really normally get to in the course of regular retronauts, because Bob and I tend to share pretty much the same interest.

There's some stuff he likes that I don't and vice versa, but it all tends to be kind of, you know, 8-bit, 16-bit Japanese console games. Things like microcomputers and even American consoles, we're pretty weak on. And people complain that we don't cover those topics. But then when we do cover the topics out of a sense of obligation, people also complain because we're not really experts on those, so we can't speak to them with, you know, the wisdom of experience. So my hope is that, you know, with Retronauts East,

we can delve into other topics, you know. I know Ben definitely, or Benj definitely has a lot of expertise on vintage 8-bit computers and things like that that I am just completely weak on. So we're kind of putting everything on your shoulders, I guess. Yeah, early American video games is my specialty. Right. So you can look forward to that. And with this one, we're going back to kind of not the original video game system,

but the original American computer in a lot of ways, the Apple II. Of course, Apple II wasn't the first American computer, but it was really in a lot of ways the breakout computer, the point at which the idea of computers as a consumer commodity, as an appliance, as something everyone could own and use and play on and also work on really took off. And we were going to talk about a different computer to start out with. But as I thought about it, I realized that in order to really talk about any other computers of that era, the late 70s, early 80s,

I really think you have to lay down the basic here and start with Apple 2 because it was so important and so influential on everything that came after. And it had an amazingly long life. It was debuted in 1977, and Apple supported it until 1993, by which point it was obviously incredibly obsolete, but it just had that much traction. It's like, you know, Game Boy or something, where there's just so many people that own it that they keep making games for it. We talked about the Nintendo Wii recently, and even though that's now about to go into its second successor, there were still Wii games coming out last year. 2016. So, you know, when a system has a huge install base, especially with, you know, a very sort of casual market that doesn't feel the need to upgrade immediately and go to the next best thing, they tend to have a really long life and be supported for a long, long time. So that's

definitely the case with Apple II. I think also an institutional market is part of that just because the Apple II ended up in a lot of the computing labs and grade school labs and that sort of thing. and they're not going to be upgrading to the next great thing. That's true. I think that that gave it the last 10 years of its life from 83 to 93. The huge install base in schools around America. Steve Jobs made a huge push to court the educational market very early on, and he got huge computer labs full of them around the country and around the world.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was a very smart strategy on his part. And, you know, the Apple 2 was relatively expensive compared to some other computers that came out a few years later, like the Confidore 64. But at the time, you know, it sold for like $1,200 at the base level, which is a lot in modern day money. But for a computer at that time, that was incredibly reasonable. I mean, you know, this was an era where a lot of people, if they wanted to do computing, would have to go to a university. and use share time on a Vax or a mainframe or something, and to have your own computer in your own house or in your own classroom that was a standalone device, you didn't have to share

it, you didn't have to worry about computing time or anything like that. That was a pretty big revolution. So yeah, that made a big, big difference. Yeah, at the time, there were some sort of all-in-one computers that predated the Apple 2 from IBM and Wang and some other, but they all cost like $10,000 to $15,000. Right. And that was like $50,000 in inflation. Yeah, I just did the numbers on a word processor that was sold for $15,078, and it's like $53,000 or something. Yeah.

It was all in one. Man, it's crazy. So, yeah, $1,200 is a good deal for that. Very good deal, yeah. Yeah, the bigger ones. Households weren't going to have them, and schools weren't going to be able to afford those either, unless you were some amazing private school. So to understand how the Apple II came into being, we have to talk a little bit about Apple itself and what came before the Apple II, because obviously it's the Apple II. There was something before that. So, of course, Apple Computer, you've probably heard of them. They started out as kind of a garage band video game, or not video game, but computing company, working out of a garage. Like, you know, to fund their first product, Steve Jobs, one of the co-founders, one of the three co-founders, sold his van. I think,

Steve Wozniak, one of the other co-founders, sold his HP Calculator. So it was one of those things where it was just like some really young dudes who had a great idea and decided to pursue it and, you know, had that sort of freedom and bohemian nonchalance, I guess, to be able to actually make some sacrifices to pursue it. And clearly it worked out for them. There was one other founder, Ronald Wayne, in the notes I wrote down that he was the Stu Sutcliffe of Apple. He quit before they became really big, kind of like Beatles bassist, Stu Sutcliffe. Yeah, it's getting kind of retro there. But anyway, Wozniak and Jobs were really the two sort of movers and shakers. Steve Jobs was the business guy.

Like, he was kind of like a Nolan Bushnell. Like, he understood business and understood people and was a good salesman. and had a lot of ideas, and not so good at actually making things happen on the technical side. But Steve Wozniak was, I would say it's fair to class him as a bit of a genius. Just a guy who really had, he intuited electronics. He would, you know, look at computers or a schematic and think, I can make this better. I don't know. If you guys want to talk about the breakout story, that's kind of the famous.

He dreamed in circuitry, I guess. Yeah, the Apple sort of originated out of Atari and Nolan Bushnell's management style, which was very egalitarian and allowed a lot of room for feedback from every level of employee in the place. And so, Atari, Steve Jobs worked for Atari in 74 or so, and they hired him to be in. engineering assistant or something like that, and they wanted him to design a new video game called Breakout. That was Nolan Bushnell's idea. And so they assigned him the project. And of course, Steve Jobs went to his buddy Waz, who actually knew how to design stuff and said, could you do this for me? And there's a whole big story about all that and whether Egypt was of money and stuff like that. Supposedly, they offered an incentive, like the simpler you can make this board. You get a bonus for every,

yeah, I see you don't put in or something. something like that, yeah. And, yeah, Wozniak made it so simple and elegant that they couldn't figure out how to reproduce it. So actually, the final product was more complex. That's what, yeah, Alan Alcorn, the first time I ever talked to him, I asked him about that. I said, did you use Was his design? He said, no.

But Wasne still thinks it was his design in the production arcade game. But one thing a lot of people don't know is that Ronald Wayne also worked for Atari. Okay. Al Alcorn told me that recently, too, when I was talking to him. So a lot of the culture, the company culture of Atari, I mean, Apple, came out of Atari. And so... Out of early Atari, which was different than Warner, Atari. Yeah, before Warner came in.

So the sort of Bohemian, although it did have its limits. I've read that Steve Jobs was pretty unpopular at Atari because he was like the super hippie guy who didn't, yeah, who didn't bathe. Yeah. It's hard to reconcile that with, you know, the dude in the Japanese custom design black turtlenex but he was just so young I mean everybody's got to have a chance to grow up right right yeah I mean he he definitely was he definitely was that kind of like hippie sort of guy at the time but he he definitely he certainly matured out of that so anyway jobs and Wozniak had their dream of creating a computer and the idea was a kit computer which was a pretty common thing back then it was basically like here's the the components, you finish it yourself. So they called it the Apple One, and it retailed for $66.66, which was apparently not a sassy reference to Satanism, but in fact was just because Steve Wozniak was like,

it's numbers. I like numbers that repeat. So that's why they... Two-thirds of a grand. The Apple One originated when Was wanted to design his own little terminal to dial into a mainframe through a modem and program on that mainframe. And so he just wanted a cheap TV terminal that he could hook up to a TV set as a display. And so it was one of the first,

if not the first computers that hooked up to a TV set. And that was a groundbreaking thing. Yeah, that was really revolutionary because before that you had like oscilloscopes or really big monitors. Terminals mostly. It's like separate serial terminals

that were like a computer into themselves. they'd connect through a serial connection. That was really popular. Or if you wanted to do real graphics, you had a whole huge separate device for that. You could have a graphical terminal. Yeah, when I was in grad school at UNC, there was the team that worked on the pixel planes,

which was an entire cabinet full of boards just to address a large number of pixels with colors. And it's this whole huge refrigerator-sized device into itself just to do that. Yeah, so the real revolution of the Apple One, was, like Benj said, the ability for it to use basically consumer televisions to output video. Composite video output. In fact, when I did a slideshow about the history of computer displays, I talked to Woz and Lee Felsenstein, who designed a similar computer at the same time that used a composite display,

and I was trying to figure out who was first. Actually, I don't exactly remember you'd have to read that on PC world to find out. In a lot of cases, things like that, it doesn't really matter who was first because they took long enough to develop that it wasn't like one person saw the other and said, oh, let's do that. A lot of times it was just convergent evolution, people having the same circuit integration at the same time. Inventions, they're just inevitable based on what's available. But Apple made it to market in 1976 with the Apple One and just sold a bare circuit board for $600 and... $0.66.66. What's that?

666. And 6006. And you could buy that and then finish it yourself by making your own case for it or doing something. I've seen some pretty weird-looking cases. The sort of famous one that you'll see around a lot is a wooden case, which is like this gigantic wooden typewriter. And someone very sort of sloppily carved the word apple one into the top edge. That's the one in the Smithsonian. That's what I see is that. Okay. But they didn't sell very many of them.

I think they only sold about 200, yeah. And so they're very rare. Very expensive now. They sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Somebody offered to sell me one for $13,000 in 2008 or something. Wow. And if you bought that, you could have flipped it for 20 times that value. 10 years, yeah, they're like a million dollars now.

Yeah, there was one that was refurbish that sold for like almost half a million dollars. Yeah, there was one that sold for 900,000 something. Oh, seriously? Yeah. Man, you could have retired on that. Yeah. Really blew it. But I didn't have $13,000.

I mean, yeah. I think there's always those the ones that got away story. Like mine is that when Apple's stock bottomed out in 1997, I really wanted to buy, like I went to my parents and was like, can you lend me some money? I did the same thing. This company is not going to die. Well, I sold a Mint Fortress Maximus when I was in middle school. Similar, yeah. You know.

Yeah. If I had spent $10,000 on that Apple stock, it would be worth about $2 million now. $1,000 to $2 million. Oh, well. That would be nice. But my parents very sensibly said, we don't have that kind of money to just sitting around. And also, you don't know anything about stocks.

What's wrong with you? So it never happened. But what could have been? Yeah, it could be bankrolling record. Yeah, I remember it would be $14 a share. That's when I wanted to buy it. But I was like, I think it was down to like single digits. And that's when I was like $7.8.

Yeah, there you go. That was when the wired magazine came out. It was like prey, the apple and the barbed wire. Yeah. It was dark times for a while. but they rebounded. And, you know, it's products like the Apple II that give people like me weird faith in this company that always seems to come up with a new good idea every decade or so.

They're due for one pretty soon, I think. But, yeah, the Apple II was really their first great idea. And we should talk about that. Yeah, we still haven't talked about it. It's like an hour in now. We're like 20 minutes in. This is actually about the Apple one. The Apple One podcast.

All right, here we go. This is how Retronaut usually goes, actually. It's a lot of rambling. Well, wasn't Mystery House from Sierra coded on the Apple One? One of the first graphic adventure games and then it was ported to the Apple II by Roberta Williams. This is just something coming from the corner of my brain. I don't know if it's true or not. Well, so the thing about the Apple II is that porting from Apple One was very easy because they were pretty much the same computer.

Similar. They had some differences, but they ran the same processor. They had a different amount of memory and RAM and everything. But functionally, they were pretty much the same thing. The Apple II had more additions to it and also came in a case, which was nice. It came with a keyboard, and it came with not a mouse, but controllers, and a tape cassette drive, which eventually became a diskette drive. It was basically a consumer-ready system,

Whereas the Apple One was for enthusiasts who didn't mind building their own wooden case and carving the word Apple into the top. The Apple II was, it was a, you know, a consumer appliance. It came in a nice beige case with rounded edges. It looked very, very attractive, very compact. It just hit all the right notes, I think, for the time to sort of present a different idea for what a computer should be. Yeah, the Apple one was the no capital version of Apple II

When they didn't have money to invest in making a case So they had to do what they had to do You know But yeah, the case that plastic case is probably a big reason Why they could sell it for the price they did Because it was mass produced I don't know if it was an injection molded What it was made out of

But yeah, it was plastic And you know, you can just mold it You know, sheet metal is expensive It's heavy, you have to screw it together More labor intensive that increases the cost. And so that was a, I think it was the first plastic computer case from ever made. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting looking at the design of this,

how like the whole philosophy was kind of to do more with less, to get something that could be a plug-in-play system that was affordable, but could do all these things by basically stripping it down to the minimum. So like we were saying how, you're saying how WAS was tasked with, you know, getting this breakout board down to the, the fewest chips. And he kept doing the same thing with this saying, you know, how little can we put into this and then make it up in software to let it do all these things. So, you know, I was reading the sound, you know, it had all this expansion capability, but the actual

sound chip that was in it, the hardware version of that made a click. Yeah. And that was the only thing it did. It made a click. And then you use software to like, yeah, so if any, if anyone had that those one of those old Casio keyboards where you could record things and then loop it and play it back, You may have noticed if you make a really short click on the pickup and it's short enough and then you can loop it fast enough, you get notes out of it. So you can do all these things with software without putting expensive chips in and that sort of informed the whole process here. At the same time, the Apple 2 did have some capabilities that really set it apart from other computers.

It could be, it could output video in color, which was apparently because Was wanted to play a good game of Breakout. So he created a system that could produce color. Yeah, that's what Waus told me in that interview. In 2007, I interviewed Waus for a game developer magazine. And I was interested in his gaming background. And he said that the Apple 2 was basically like his personal console. So he could design a software version of breakout because the hardware version of breakout was just done in discrete logic chips.

and it wasn't programmed like we do today so he wanted to program it which is interesting because that's one of the first adventures in software-based video games which is at that time there weren't very many of those they only started coming out in the mid to late 70s so he wanted to have color he wanted to have sound he wanted to have paddle inputs

so he had input for two paddles and that could be combined into a joystick and x and y axis put together analog and the buttons I think like everything was like you're saying there's so many circuit shortcuts the buttons are like the command keys or whatever the control keys or something like that

and the paddles were done with a tiny amount of hardware like all it was for a single paddle was it just like controlled the speed of an oscillator with a tiny amount of hardware and then he used a software timer to like see how fast it was going and get a readout of the paddle just all kinds of tricks

in fact his his trick of doing color with the fewest number of chips possible was one of the crowning achievements of the Apple 2 because like nobody could figure out how to do color video with so few chips at the time just lots of tricks and hacks going on there that that's where he basically when you store I know when you store video images in Apple 2 like they're not contiguous in memory they're right they're placed in different places because of the way that he did the refresh timing on the screen it's weird it's very complicated there was there's this relationship between the color and the position of the pixels or even the

subposition of the pixels. So it's a very strange hacky solution, but it worked. Yep. So, yeah, lots of crazy stuff happening underneath the hood. But, you know, I guess everyone kind of learned to think like was because it became such a popular platform. So everyone had to, you know, program for Apple II. So it probably made people like smarter about how they approach technology or, you know,

the people who really care. Maybe people who didn't really care got stuck into the run of just creating for Apple 2 and so they went to other systems that conform to what we think of computers nowadays and we're like, what? But who knows? Anyway, one of the interesting things about the Apple II to me is that its main chip, the CPU, was a Moss 6502, which you may recognize as the chip that powers the Nintendo Entertainment System.

And because of the Apple II's popularity, that became kind of a de facto standard for a lot of American-made computers. I know, crap, I totally blanked out, but I think... Commodore 64 has a derivative. I think it has a 6510 is what they call it. And before that, I think like the... Atari 2,600 has a 6507, which is a stripped down version of the 6502 or something like that. Yeah, but that became kind of like the standard for... Yeah, the Commodore had a 65.2.

That's what it was, the pet, yeah. And, well, let's see, what did the, I should know the TRS 80 may have been a 65-O-2. It could be, but in the UK and in Japan, Z-80 processors were more common, which was, you know, that kind of gets into the Nintendo origin story where, and Satoro Yawada, because he was a big fan of the Commodore Pet, which was not a popular system in Japan. He was one of the few Japanese programmers that knew 6502 language, so when Nintendo needed help putting together its early games, they could. reach out to Satoro Luato or actually he reached out to them and it was like hey yo I know this chip I've programmed stuff on yeah didn't he do VIC-20 games uh for Commodore by contract I think it was pet games oh he might have done I read that he did VIC-20 like Hal did some of they did the Jupylander a lot of the first contract work games for the VIC-20 which is really neat so it's all it's all

kind of tied together everything's connected tiny universe um so it wasn't as fast as an NES it was 1.023 megahertz, whereas the NES is like 3.5. But, you know, it's... The reason they chose the 6502 was because it was really cheap. That seems to be the reason for a lot of people using 6502. But, you know, the quality control is bad and the yield was bad in production. And there's a story of when Chuck Petal, the designer, the 6502, took them to a conference or something. And he had this big bucket or barrel full of them.

And it turned out that the only the ones on the top, the chips on the top and work. The rest were like duds rejects from the factory. Well, fortunately, I've never heard about like Apple II recalls, so I assume those were all weird out at the factory. Yeah, they'd probably ironed out later within a year, so.

So anyway, that's pretty much the basics for the Apple II. Like we said, it could output to television monitors. It could do NTSC or PAL, so it could work in either the U.S. or Europe, which was extremely helpful, I'm sure, for Apple expanding its reach beyond American shores.

And it shipped with its own built-in-Basic, integer basic, which was developed by Steve Wozniak. That was later replaced by AppleSoft Basic, which was, I guess, more flexible. Yeah, that was developed by Microsoft. And so Integer Basic could only do integers math, so it couldn't do floating point decimals and things. Yeah. So that was a significant drawback. I mean, once they, for bigger applications, like financial things. But you've got to walk before you can run.

Yeah. And there's also the fact that it didn't do lowercase character. Right, in the first. But that was good enough for a homebrew computer in 1977, which is what was wanted. And that was even standard on a lot of mainframes back then. You had your basic ASCII that was not even the full set. I mean, you still came across, you know, console games in the 90s that were all uppercase. someone just released a ROM patch for

working designs games Lunar and Lunar 2 that allow you to play the game with lowercase letters which was not present it's a lot of reading to do in all caps Yeah it sounds like everybody's shouting Basically yeah Come to my temple

Save the game I mean yes it was one thing but when you got to you know like novel length video games It's a little fatiguing So yeah So I mean there were definitely limitations to the Apple too but those are understandable, and many of those were ironed out over subsequent releases. There were several different models of the Apple 2, the 2 Plus, the 2E, the 2C, the 2C plus, and the 2GS.

Each of those had its own different selling point. Do you guys have experience with those? I think I have all of them. Oh, okay. So which is your favorite? I don't know. Recently I've been playing with the 2C Plus, which is really neat because it was the last one they produced. The last new model they produced, it has a 3.5 inch 800K floppy drive built into it.

So it's just like the 2C. It's all in one except no monitor or anything. But it's got that 800K drive. The new fangled drive. It has a, yeah, it can run it. I think it's 4 megahertz. It has like sort of a zip chip built in accelerator. So you can switch it really fast.

So what year was that? Was that like the 90s? Oh, man. I should know this by heart, but it was. See, Apple 2 was discontinued in 93. It was, you know, 90 something. 91, 98, 89. Well, to me the most interesting is the Apple 2GS, which is the one 16-bit model that they produced.

Yeah, that's amazing. And it's crazy that there was a 16-bit Apple 2, but the really interesting thing is that it also used a, like, it kind of did the same upgrade path as the NES to Super NES, the chip that it used was the same chip that you found in the Super NES. So, of course, it could be backward compatible, and that just kind of fuels the idea that Nintendo designed the Super NES originally to be compatible with the NES, even though they didn't actually execute on that. So, yeah, the 2GS is a hybrid platform. It's kind of its own thing. It could run the 8-bit software, but it had 16-bit processor with greater colors and an awesome software synthesizer for sound or wave table thing,

didn't it? Something like that. Yeah, and so I think the one, I think the model I have the most experience with is the Apple 2E. So that was the revision where they condensed a lot of the hardware onto a single ASIC chip and brought the price down again, which I think helped it get into a lot of grade school computer labs, which is where I found it. So I'm pretty sure my grade school had had a lot with, yeah, you know, a dozen Apple IIs with the usuals, Oregon Trail and all that stuff and some other games on it. And so that was where I had a lot of my experience with, with this platform. Yeah, for me, Apple II is a really huge gap in my personal experience because I was, you know, growing up and in computer labs and stuff around the same time that the Apple II was sort of at

its peak. But because I lived in Lubbock, Texas, where Texas Instruments had a factory, all the schools had TI-99-4As. And so I didn't really see Apple twos. You know, every lab had a TI computer. And there was one, the one Apple II, I don't know which model, maybe the 2E when I was in like sixth grade. And that was like the teacher's computer in the computer lab. and they eventually phased out the TIs in favor of Macintoshes. So we just kind of leapfrogged over the two. But I did, you know, I was always super enthusiastic about messing around with computers as a kid. So I kind of ingratiated myself as the computer lab teacher's pet.

So I would like go and hang out and stuff at the student computer lab. And she would let me play load runner on the two. Sorry, we were looking up. the timeline. Oh, okay. I had a feeling. 1988 for the 2C plus. 1988.

Yeah, that came to mind. Yeah, and the 2E was out in 83. If I hadn't drank so much gin, I would remember. All right. Whoops. That's the problem with gin. Yeah. Okay, well, we...

This is gin Apple. Yeah, so anyway, that's pretty much the basics of the Apple 2. We'll talk about the Apple 2 vis-vis video games, but first let's take a quick quick refresher break quick refresher break through the rigorous introduction to the Apple II. Let's talk about the important thing, which is the games. There were so many games, so many groundbreaking, influential genre-defining games.

I mean, it's kind of amazing. I guess, you know, the system hung on for 16 years, and even up toward the very end, you had revolutionary video games being made for. Jordan Mechner created Prince of Persia for Apple II in 1989. Like, that's nuts. That was 12 years after the system's debut. Yeah. And Ultima 5 still was on there.

I think it may have been the original platform for that. Really? Ultima 4 and 5. Yeah, so it hung on. And because of its popularity, I mean, it was really the first breakout computer system. And it would be another five years before the Commodore 64 launched. So it kind of had a, you know, like a big run for a while in the U.S. So because of that, you know, the video game market was just beginning to blossom.

That worked out to mean a lot of games showed up on Apple 2. So if you look back in the 70s, obviously there weren't that many games that came out. There was Steve Wozniak's Brickout, which was Breakout, but with Bricks. And Sideways. What's that? And sideways. Sideways. That's the important thing. that was actually

I would say that was unusually thoughtful of him to create a clone that wasn't a total direct rip-off of the game he was imitating maybe back in that day you had you know pawn clones that were just pong

but he at least turned Atari's breakout sideways yeah 90 degrees or something totally different but really to me the two big games released in the 70s for if we're Apple 2, were a callabeth and temple of upshy, both of which are apshy, both of which are very early, very sort of prototypical role-playing games.

But the Apple 2 would really become sort of like the Petri dish for computer RPGs in a lot of cases. So you kind of get a sense of what's going to happen on the system with these very early releases. There were only maybe like a dozen games released before 1980 for the system. So you have two big RPGs, I think, kind of shows the intentions. And I think it also shows the advantage of a computer over a console. Like you compare Temple of Upshi to Adventure on Atari 2,600. And there's a lot more happening in Temple of Opshire. A lot more RAM. Yeah, it makes a big difference. More storage space, more memory, more interface options.

You could type as opposed to move things around with a single stick and a button. So that made a huge difference. Can you imagine as a kid in the 70s, if you're like a technically inclined kid getting this computer where you could program anything you want on it with no restrictions? It's like giving everybody a game development kit. Yeah, I mean, that was, yeah, that's pretty much how Richard Garriot got a start. Yeah, and so many other developers like Tim Sweeney. And who's the other one I mentioned earlier?

It is in here somewhere. Macner? John Romero. Jordan Meckner. John Romero, yeah. He got a start on Apple, too. Yeah, so definitely an important jumping off point for me. many developers.

Do you guys want to talk about a Calabeth or Temple of Opshy at all? I haven't really played them, but I'm familiar with them. I've played a Calabeth in a simulator on a PC. I don't think I played the Apple 2. I mean, yeah, the Apple 2 version. I mean, very primitive. I had ugly skeletons in it, but I mean, it was cool at the time. Yeah, unfortunately, I missed out on a lot of the role-playing side of the games that

were going on back then because, as I said, I had access to this in a school computer lab. So even when we could get away with playing games that weren't edgetainment, it was still going to be in short bursts, so it would more towards the action game side of things. I didn't have it in my house. I had a different early computer, which we'll probably talk about on a different episode.

But yeah, so I didn't really get to dip my toe into the Apple to the longer games, the RPGs, and that stuff, so much. It wasn't a Calabeth first person the whole time. So that wire frame first. First person dungeon crawl kind of thing.

It predates Wizards. Greek, doesn't it? It does, yeah. Yeah, so probably. Wizard of year was 1981, a Colabeth was 1979. 79, yeah, so that's real early. Temple of Apshy was one of the first dungeon crawler kind of top-down things of the vein

that inspired Rogue. Yeah, I mean, it really does look like a prototype for Rogue. It doesn't have any of the depth or substance, but there's still a lot going on. Like, it's a top-down graphical sort of adventure where you walk around and bump into bad guys and kill them. Yeah. Very, very simplistic, but, you know, at the time, I'm sure it was incredibly intoxicating. I love going back and watching, you know, modern day movies and TV series where they're set in, like, the late 70s, early 80s, and people are playing these computer games and video games and being like, wow, I can't believe I can do this.

Stuff like Halting Catch Fire or, I don't know, there's some other shows kind of like that where, you know, kids play old video games and there's just a sense of. wonder and I can I can remember that even though I didn't really is like that doesn't A.T have a good video game scene or something I think so I may just hear it but you mean the E.T the video game. E.T. is a movie. We did have something very similar to rogue like and I don't remember the name of it so I don't know if it was related to temple of upshy but on the Osborne PC that my dad had um you know which had this little tiny text only screen so you know you're limited to a dozen columns and rows of text um but so it's very similar to what you see in rogue where it was all just little representations.

But it was that, it was another game in that genre that was very, very early. On the TI, there was tunnels of doom. Did you ever play that? I didn't, but I had a friend who had a TI and played it and let me watch, which was about as good as I got back then. Okay.

But it looked really cool. Oh, on the calculator? No, no, the T.99. On the 99. Okay. It was a cartridge game, but it loaded off discs, like extra dungeons or something like that. Yeah, it was pretty rad.

But that's the T-I. We're talking about Apple, too. Right. Coming back. So then in 1980, you have two other very seminal games, Mystery House, which was, that was the debut game by Online or Sierra Online, Ken and Roberta Williams. Yeah, so it wasn't on the Apple One then, like it's mentioned. Well, they might have developed it on the Apple One.

Maybe. My memory is probably just flawed. But it was the first. Do you think there were actually commercial releases for Apple One, given that it was owned by 200 people. I don't think it was a commercial release. I think it may have just been developed for fun. Yeah, that could be.

I just disregard that. It's fine because, I mean, it does kind of get into something we haven't really talked about, which is the communities that grew up around these, you know. There were the user groups and things like that. And publishing a game in Richard Garriott's time was a Ziploc bag. A collar bag. It was not exactly a deluxe edition game you get now with like a porcelain statue and a steel book.

It was pretty much the opposite. And it certainly makes sense that some of those 200 people who had the Apple One kit and were messing with it would have been the people to go on and be developers for the Apple II once it actually had. And probably most of those systems were sold in around Silicon Valley. I doubt that that computer had national distribution. So there was probably this little pocket of people

who started using this computer and then the Apple 2 came out nationwide they sort of had the leg up on it. The mystery house was the first graphical adventure game, I'm pretty sure. It was a hybrid really of text and graphics, but it did have a, you know,

it was kind of like a Colabeth style wireframe graphics for each scene. Yeah, hand-drawn really, really bad graphics. But they're neat. That was a new concept. It was a text adventure game with pictures, essentially. And at the same time, 1980, also you saw the sort of pioneering graphical or text adventure game come out to Apple II, Zork.

And that had been around since 1977, 78. It kind of evolved over the course of a few years as a mainframe system, collaborative effort in MIT. And heavily influenced by the classic cave adventure that we were talking about, which was really the origin of that whole genre. And, yeah, that had been a, like a non-commercial release, but 1980 saw the first public commercial release on Apple II. And, you know, we talked about how Apple II gave developers the ability to create more and do more than consoles. But in this case, they actually had to cut Zork into two halves, Zork one and three.

I think it's three. I think Zork is pretty much just one and two. and three is sort of like its own new thing. But it was basically two games or it was one game but they cut into it. Yeah, it's too big for a PC essentially.

Yeah, because those added adventure before were all developed on mainframes where there were a lot of limits but they certainly had a lot of memory available. So that was kind of the beginning of Infocom as a company and they would be a major presence on Apple 2 pretty much through their end.

They were eventually bought up as we talked about last episode actually or two episodes ago the Activision episode they were bought up by Activision which then became mediogenic and it all fell apart but during the stone into being on Macintosh too yeah but during the sort of golden era of the Apple 2 infocom reign supreme for text adventures In 19801, you see more diversity in games. You have other text and graphical adventures like the follow-up to Mystery House. Not like sequel or anything, but just the next Sierra online game, which was SoftPorn Adventures,

which I don't know anyone who's ever actually played that. I've played it. Have you? Yeah. We had it for the Atari 800. when we were kids of course I think it was a bootleg copy it was you know

it was kind of raunchy but not really pornographic it was very tame by modern standards but it was fun for a couple little kids to play just a little farther than Leisure Suit Larry Yeah Leisure Suit Larry was based on Soft Porn Adventure the story was very similar but it had graphics

Yeah I never played it but I looked at a I watched believe it or not there's a long play of it on YouTube because what could be more exciting than a long play he said long play that's right be this um it's an old reference uh yeah i know there's a like videos of someone playing it through but you kind of lose something with a graphical adventure when you know all the the choices to make and you just like type that out but it didn't really seem to have a lot of you know sex it was more just like you were traveling through

descriptions of really, really overwritten descriptions of seedy places with roaches and dirty bathrooms and stuff. I was like, yeah, that's a good description of it. It's mostly just that atmosphere herein. It's not really a sex game. Right.

Did I get to the hot tub with Roberto Williams I did not. But that's definitely why that game is best known because you have like people who worked at Sierra Online, including Roberto Williams, naked in a hot tub, three women with a waiter holding shambi.

Was that Ken Williams, actually? Was the waiter cat? Maybe, but I'm sure he was excited about that. It's like, yes, I will volunteer for this king of water shoot. On the more, I don't know, the less

smutty, more punch-a-notty Nazi side of things, you had Castle Wolfenstein, which a series that still lives on. There's probably going to be another Wolfenstein game out this year or next year, is my guess. It's very different these days, but Castle

Wolfenstein was very influential. It kind of had the top-down view of Temple of Opsi or, you know, if you wanted to look at the arcade inspiration, something like Berserk or Frenzy, but it played, it did not have just like the pure shooting action of an arcade game. It was more... Yeah, you took steps. It was like one step at a time, and then you have to find a gun, find some bullets, hide from the guards and stuff.

Yeah, there was still to it. You could put on disguises. You could dress yourself as an SS guard. Wow. My brother played that on. Atari a lot. So I had ports of these games. Same with Temple of Afshay played down there.

Yeah. The one step at a time also makes it sound like sort of a filtering in the rogue the rogue-like influence there. Maybe. I think Rogue came out in 1981. So again, I think it's a lot of these ideas just sort of came together at the same time.

Didn't it have voices too? It did. It had like very, very simple digitized voices saying October. Yeah. Which, you know, when you consider the fact that the speaker was basically a clicker on or wrong. The fact that they could fake someone speaking German, even in the very static way. It's code modulation. Yeah.

It's kind of impressive. Yeah, it's neat. And then the other two big games. Well, Adventure showed up on Apple 2 that year. Ben, do you want to talk about that one? I see you made notes. Oh, yeah. So I was just confirming that that was a port of the old original Advent.

Colossal Cave Adventure Codebase, which had been embellished on many times since it was originally done in the PDP, on a PDP 11. So, you know, originally it was this guy who was the first author's name, Will Crowther. He was a caver, and he was just wanted to convey these experience of exploring through a bunch of caves. And so he kind of made that into this text adventure prototype. And then some other people came on and added fantasy elements. It kept evolving. And, yeah, a port of it eventually made it onto the Apple II. So, yeah, that's kind of like almost, you know, the origins of video game role-playing, in a sense.

But in 1981, you had two games that really defined what role-playing would be, which were Ultima 1, basically the next game from the creator of Akhala-beth, Richard Garriot. And it really did lay down a lot of the basics of what RPGs would be, and wizardry, which was sort of the defense. definitive dungeon crawler, and there are still games being made in the wizardry mold, such as my personal favorite Etrine Odyssey. And, you know, almost 40 years later, like, that's still a very viable

style of game. Japan allowed to throw some wizardry. They did. And so it influenced so much. Yeah, I think that came to them through, well, you know, some of the people who, Japanese developers who were into RPGs in the early days, played

wizardry in English. But then Hank Rogers, the guy who would eventually go on to bring Tetris to Nintendo, developed a game called the Black Onyx for Japanese PCs, and that was the first game developed specifically for the Japanese market, the first RPG, and like proper RPG, I think, you know. And that really did become sort of it. What platform was that? That was, I want to say, PC 8801. It could have been FM1.

I don't know, but it was, it was, you know, one of those early Japanese PCs, and it became hugely influential. And, you know, even though Japanese RPGs eventually went off more of the Dragon Quest direction, that love of dungeon crawlers never really died. So, yeah, that wizardry has become more of a big deal in Japan than in the U.S. And that actually, I think, had an impact on the career trajectory of one of the founders. of Surtec, the company that made Wizardry, Robert Woodhead, would eventually leave the company in the late 80s because he just, like, Japan loved his game, and he would go to Japan, and he loved Japan.

So he founded a company called Animago. That was into bringing Anime to America. He's one of our hometown guys, Animago is down here in Raleigh. Oh, it's in Raleigh? I thought it was Wilmington. No, Wilmington, that's right, Wilmington. But close, yeah. He's definitely someone I need to track down.

He's a great guy. I've run into him at conventions a few times. He's really easy to talk to. But yeah, it's just kind of interesting how there's all these intersections. Like the video games industry in the 80s was very, very small. So you get lots of weird little collisions like this. But yeah, those where, like, Wizardry and Ultima are basically, like, that's role-playing games right there.

Just about anything you want to find in an RPG is either in one of those two games or Dragon Quest. It's hard, or rogue, I guess. And the precursors of rogue. I mean, that's such a complicated lineage that goes back through mainframes. There's a lot of contested who did what first. There was some games like that on the Plato educational system in the early 70s. It's complicated.

But, yeah, wizardry just profoundly influential. Yeah, I mean, in a lot of these cases, people took ideas that they had seen before elsewhere. but kind of the important thing that they did was to bring those all together into a package that they could not only did they could sell but parties did wasers do you have parties it did yeah so that may have been one of the key innovations versus those other games a party based RPG one was just the avatar yeah i'm not sure party yeah a lot of the first iterations were single player character single person i mean even dragon quest at that the first game was a single player game or a single character game

And then the second game introduced, you know, a party. So, yeah, wizardry definitely, like, super influential. I'd love to do a full episode on that series sometime. But definitely one of the reasons the Apple II was so important, I think, because it really was, again, you know, a lot of these ideas did exist and were kicking around before that. But this is where they really took form. And so I put them into a package and was like,

this is a self-contained product that you can enjoy. And actually, wizardry was more than self-contained because each of its next few sequels sort of required you to have played and completed the previous game. You could take your party into the sequel. Yeah, transfer them over. Yeah, and... Like Bard's Tale. You could do that in Bard's Tale.

That was a good game. Yeah, and that was kind of like, you know, the sequels became increasingly arcane up to the fourth sequel, which has a reputation for being one of the hardest video games ever. Do you guys know about that one? I lost out after maybe.

I mean, I just stopped paying attention to Wizardry around, well, I mean, I think I played the first two games most of the way through. Not that, you know, like, whenever Wizardry 4 came out, I was probably like five years old or something.

It was actually like 1988. Okay, so I was saying, but yeah were there any ports to that to the NES or anything like that I can't remember The first two wizardries came out on NES Maybe the third one

I don't think the third one And there were I think there was a wizarding game on Super NES But it was like Wizardry 5 Yeah I don't think Wizardry 4 made it off of microcomputers

Because again it was Legendarily difficult You played as the villain And the quest was You had been imprisoned in a dungeon and your journey was to get out of the dungeon and to just be like total jerks about it

Surtec took player parties players would submit their parties on Desquette and they would take like these high level player parties and turn them into roving groups of enemies that you would have to deal with and Worden himself the villain was like super weak but you could summon enemies and so you were basically fighting through heroes

with the trash mobs that heroes destroy. So a total inversion. It's like every dungeon level is full of crazy traps and just like teleporter mazes and all kinds of just like anything you could think of in a first person dungeon crawler that makes you angry is probably a Wizardry 4. That's why I never played it.

Yeah. It was probably just as well. But Wizard 3 5 was a new team and totally reinvented the entire series and is really well regarded. So like the last four, you know, four wizardry games, five, six, seven, eight, all have great reputations.

But I think they're kind of hard to play these days. Anyway, this has become the wizardry podcast. Well, now we've done our wizardry retrospective. I guess we don't need to do that one. Yeah, farewell. But around this time, you started to see a lot of arcade games being ported to Apple II. And I had never played to be those.

How were those ports? Like, how did Burger Time turn out? on Apple 2. I don't play that one. Some of the other ones coming up in the next few years on here. Moon Patrol was an arcade port. That was, so Moon Patrol was actually one of Irom's first hits. So Iram of R-type and all that.

Although the ports I read were handled by Atari. Yeah, Atari Soft at that time. That was the label this one. But it was pretty, I mean, you know, so I hadn't actually, of course, at the time I hadn't played the arcade version so I didn't know what I was missing out on and of course it doesn't look nearly as good but it gets the concept through pretty well and it even pulls some of the tricks so like moon patrol and arcade was one of the first games to use parallax scrolling with multiple planes of backgrounds going at different speeds and so then the Apple version they actually did their best to keep it the only thing that remains is like a single vector line of mountains in the background that's being redrawn at a different scroll rate from the foreground and that's all it is, but it still gets you the effect. So, you know, A for effort. Um, they definitely tried to keep it all. And, and it was just a fun little game. You know, it's a, it's a scroll to the, scroll to the right and shoot things. You're in this moon buggy. You have to jump

over pits, blow up things in front of you. Alien's come in from the top and you shoot upwards to get them and it's just go until you die, basically as it throws more and more stuff at you. But, but as a little bite-sized arcade experience, it was, it was pretty nice. I forgot the guy's name, but the designer of Moon Patrol would go on to design Street Fighter. or not Street Fighter Yeah, yeah, that's right, Street Fighter. He designed Kung Fu and then he left Iram to Capcom

and worked on Street Fighter. So, again, small world, all these little connections. To me, I don't know about you guys, but to me, the big game that showed up on Apple 2 in 1982 was Choplifter. There were a lot of ports and games

that showed up simultaneously on other platforms, but Choplifter was, I don't know, it had a big impact on me, least it's a it's a shooter with a twist um you fly a helicopter and you know you have to take on enemy jets and uh missile emplacements on the ground so you know that part of it pretty standard fair but the point of it is not just to blow up the enemies i mean you really don't even have to fight the enemies if you don't want the real point is to land and pick up hostages who are in the crisis zone and then take them back to your base and deposit them safely uh so

it's kind of got a little bit of defender. But it's much slower-paced. And you have to be a lot more careful with the hostages because if you land on them, they'll die. And if you sit around on the ground too long, you know, jets will fly past and bomb you. And if your chopper shot down while there are hostages aboard, then you lose the hostages.

Now that you say that I'm remembering that frustration. I think I played that one somewhere. Yeah. Well, that one was interesting because it started on Apple 2. and became a pretty big series on consoles and in the arcade. Sega developed an arcade port of it, and there were several sequels including Choplifter, I think it went up to three on Super NES.

So it had kind of a little life to it, but it started out on Apple II. Yeah, Choplofter was really popular. I found it really frustrating. I think I played on the Apple 2, but it was popular, so it had something to it, obviously. Same with Moon Patrol. I have discs of Moon Patrol

You know, you could tell how popular games were back then By how many copies of pirated discs you have So I could go through my collection I've gotten like five or six collections of discs from different people You could just tally them up Moon Patrol is always there Choplifter's always there We didn't get away with that stuff in the school computer lab

I mean, had to have legit copies of a few things And in 1983 would go on to be a really big year maybe, I don't know, maybe one of the biggest for Apple II just because of all the games, like really big, influential games that showed up there. Yeah, you look like you're about to say something. No? I never talk.

I'm recalling the 83, you know. So much happened that year. If you say 83, it's like an explosion of memories come back. Yeah, I mean, this was interesting because it's right around the time that the U.S. console market collapsed. So Atari and television and KalikoVision were all dying. And people were starting to look more toward the personal computer.

And the C-64 had launched the previous year, 1982. But the Apple 2 was still big, still had kind of like the biggest mind share. So you started seeing a lot of really great games that people started to look in the U.S. to the personal computer as where they wanted to put their games instead of the Atari 2600. So there's kind of a paradigm shift that happens here. And I think it kind of gave the Apple II, you know, helped give it some extra life. A lot of people upgraded from the $2,600 straight to a home computer, like Atari 800 or Commodore 64 or Apple 2. And that was, it's sort of, that's one of the reasons why I made my blog vintage computing and gaming

is to tie those things together, where some people just say, these are all video games, these are all computers, but they actually are interrelated. So that was kind of the next With the console market collapsed You know the PC market had to pick up All those traditions to keep them going The PC market was one of the reasons Why the console market collapsed

I mean just that availability there And they were not that much more expensive than Commodore's offerings were not that much more expensive Than we're getting consoles and souls And you can do them anyway That's for another time Well that's great You know some of the games

The big games that came out in 83 for Apple 2 were games that you think, oh, that seems more of a natural fit for a console. But, you know, despite being more fast-paced, more action, more sports, they did make their debut on PC. One-on-one Dr. J. versus Larry Bird was a one-on-one basketball game. That's notable. It was an early release. Was it the first release?

It might be. It was very early. It was the first licensed. The first game to use licensed likenesses of athletes. Well, actually, Pele soccer was probably the first for the Atari 2,600. Oh, okay. But for a computer. Right.

Well, and, you know, also for a sport that Americans cared about at the time. Paley was pretty well known back then, but Americans were like soccer. Yeah, Pelae. Good old Paling. so that was a pretty big deal um pinball construction set i guess that was more of a natural it's another EA game but oh that's right it was developed by designed by Bill Budge. This was back when Electronic Arts was

like electronic artists. Let us celebrate the creators who make these games. I did a really neat interview with Tripp Hawkins for the 30th anniversary of electronic arts. It should have been a couple years ago, 2013 or something. But yeah, that was

the idea was to be like a publisher of games to treat them like they were record albums. Excuse me. Like record albums. And give the creators their due like artists with their name on the label and everything the programmers. Like Atari under

their new corporate masters had not been Yeah, I mean Activision was motivated by much the same So that was yeah both both one-on-one And pinball construction set were pretty big deals Pinball construction set was kind of the beginning of the construction genre the idea of Like you can be a programmer too Here are some simple tools here are some simple tools

here are the resources you need please make things in this case you're making pinball tables and that would be a very influential game let's see that you also saw Arcon I assume it's Arcon not Archen which was kind of like

the precursor to battle chess it was basically chess but with melee combat I disagree it's not like battle chess because battle chess is just chess with animations so it's got the same rules as chess. It's just

the characters beat each other over the head when you take capture. You enlighten me. What's different about Arkham? Well, Archon is a turn-based strategy game based on a board game like setting where you have different pieces. And when you try to capture a piece on a square, then you go into a mode that is the melee combat, the action-oriented. So it's all real time. Two players have to face off and shoot each other or smash each other. And there's skill avoiding each other and stuff.

That's one of my brother's favorite games on the Atari 800, which is actually the platform it originated on Atari 8-bit computer. But it was big on the Apple, too, as well, and Commodore 64. And then finally, maybe the biggest game that year would have been Load Runner by Doug Smith, published by Broderbund, or Broderbund. And that's another one of these games that was kind of an evolution of other ideas. In this case, taking universal.

Space Panic, which in turn was kind of based on Hayankyo Alien, which I covered on Game Boy World, and I said, Hey, Yom Kyo, Alien, out loud, probably more times than any other white person in the world. Hey,anko! But, yeah, like, the idea was, you know, kind of a platformer, but without jumping, there was climbing and falling,

and you were constantly being pursued by enemy robots or monks or whatever they call them in the manual, the version you play. But you could defend yourself by digging holes, and the robots would fall into those holes, and eventually the holes would fill back in. If the robot was in a hole, as it filled in,

then it would be destroyed and have to respond. And your goal was to collect gold piles that were scattered around the maze and escape. I don't remember the gold part. Are you talking about Lod Runner now? Yeah, the gold is Lod Runner. Okay, yeah, the gold is load runner. Yeah, yeah. But do you know

there is a clone of Space Panic called Apple Panic that was really popular. I did. Yes, I have heard that. And that's another game that's always pirated. Like, everybody has a copy. So it must have been pretty influential. Yeah, Space Panic, the big difference between Space Panic and Load Runner is one, there's the collection element of the Gold and Load Runner.

And also in Space Panic, when you dig a hole, what's that? Can't you climb in Loader? Yeah, there's overhand bars. Yeah, there's ladders. Ladders are in Space Panic also. But in Space Panic, when you dig a hole, the enemy will just fall through it down to the lower level, but in Load Runner, it'll fall into the hole and get trapped. And can't you bury them in SpacePenic?

Yeah, you can't bury them like... But in Load Runner, you can't fill it. You have to wait until it refills on its own. And also in Load Runner, the robots can pick up gold if they run over it. So you can collect all the gold you see and not be able to escape the level. And so you have to figure out, like, which robot has the gold. So when you get into a hole, then it'll fall the hole, the robot will drop it and you can pick it up.

Right. So it's a, it's a very good and very influential game. That's another one of those that became really popular in Japan versus here. Like the first Road Runner was a really good, it was a strong seller on PCs. And, you know, there were some console versions of it. But in Japan, it was one of the first third-party games for Famicom. And all those early third-party games sold millions of copies. And so it spawned a pretty big series after that.

There were several additional sequels for Famicom and Disc System and, you know, then other platforms, Sega and Master System are SG-1000. Yeah, so it really became a big deal. That was actually something Doug Smith talked about in an interview later in his life about how it was really kind of weird that, like, it was a successful game here, but then over in Japan it became this... A cultural phenomenon. Yeah, phenomenon.

I don't want to, you know, belabor the point. point, but are there any other games sort of later in the system's life that you guys think are worth highlighting? Carotica. Yeah, Carotica. Some. Jordan McNers. That one was really big in the computer

lab. I guess both because you know, it's fairly short but dense in challenges. And unlike a lot of the other games where your actions are very, it feels like there's a lot of things you can do in it with different combinations of punches and kicks and different kinds of enemies that come at.

through the levels and it was really one of the first games that gave you a feeling of hand-to-hand combat so it's the sort of thing that went on obviously with MacDur

to become Prince of Persia but it also feels like a real precursor to fighting games and so that was something people really loved to put time into getting better at in Carotica

he digitized his brother too like not he did that in Prince of Persia but I think He took pictures of his brother doing karate or himself or something. Frame by frame by hand. I think that was the first game I ever played on the Apple 2. Because we had an Apple 2E clone when I was a kid that my dad built himself.

He was an electronics engineer. He like got us, bought a like a bootleg board, bought the chips and assembled it and got some copies of the ROMs or whatever. We had that and man, it was a cool game. And I just set that up on my Apple 2C plus a few months ago. and I have a six-year-old and a four-year-old, and the four-year-old daughter was just playing it like crazy. She did great on it. Could she beat the... Yeah, she got really far.

I can't believe it. She got way farther than I could. She got the birds. Yeah, she got really far. I don't know. And there's a dog at the end, isn't there? I never got that far. Oh, man.

I'm pretty sure. So there's a bunch of categories of MOOCs and there's the birds. And then I think once you get near the end, the boss has a dog that he sends out first that's really fast. Wow. Geez. Yeah, I've never seen that, but it sounds terrifying. I've only played it on Game Boy and I was not very good at that version.

It's cool on Apple, too. The music is neat. And it really has some of the, I mean, because probably probably in large part thanks to the sort of pseudorotoscoping it does, it has some of the most fluid animation of anything that you see on that machine. Yeah, that was a technical achievement, definitely. Yeah, and I mentioned earlier that

that game's follow-up, Prince of Persia, began life on Apple II also. It was really pretty much the last big game for Apple II coming out in 1989. By that point, you know, Saganesis was out in America, so people had moved on beyond the Apple II, but that is where Prince of Persia started,

and it ended up on basically every system under the sun. But it was, you know, kind of that sign that Apple II continued to be influential and an important place for game development for so long. well you did ultima 4 come out that was 85 that's another one that was considered a very important

influential game which is the first RPG where you're not just trying to kill everybody but you have a moral dilemma and all that and that originated on the Apple too so there you go and let's see 86 we had another one of our personal computer lab popular ones with Spy Hunter

which I was just reading up apparently was originally supposed to be a James Bond game And the guy who programmed it was listening to James Bond soundtracks and ended this game, but they couldn't actually get the license. So we have Peter Gunn theme instead. It's Ted. I think I remember hearing that too. Yep.

Yeah, I think beyond this point, you get to games that are on Apple, but were probably developed simultaneously across the C-64, or Atari 800, and Amiga. And I'm pretty sure that was. And IBM DOS also. And P-N-P-C. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah, by that point, the market had really diversified, and the Apple 2 was kind of on the way out. But it was still getting these games, like as simultaneous releases. It was still a platform that people owned and that developers wanted to publish on. Now, let's talk about the Oregon Trail then. Okay, sure. That's 85, right? Yeah, I mean, that game has a long, long history. This was definitely not the first version of Oregon Trail, but...

But it was the most impactful, probably, for our generation. Yeah, I would say so. Ended up in everyone's school on this very first. Yeah, we did an episode entirely on MECC. Oh, wow. That was several years ago. So if you're listening at home, go check that one out. But, yeah, please share your experiences.

I never really played out Oregon Trail much, but I know it is a precious part of many people's childhoods. In my elementary school, we had a computer lab for our school, and it was full of Apple II E's, I think. And we go in there sometimes once a month or something and do logo. or something like that or and when we were done with our logo lesson we could play the organ trail so we would team up like we had partners two per computer because there weren't enough computers for everybody and me and somebody else would um try to make it all the way through and it just seemed like such a huge epic adventure because you know as a kid your mind fills in all the blanks and you just have an incredible imagination so um it was amazing but and there was a lot of real history at any i guess it was

developed by, like Jeremy said, Mech, which is the Minnesota. Educational computer consortium like that. Yeah. And so, so, you know, they had an actual historian working on this to put in things that you would have actually run into at that time and in that, in those places. And I think, and this was the part of the vector, I think, that got all these Apple twos into so many school computer labs was that there were these educational, these things that could capture kids' attention, but were also had real educational content in them. for this platform and so I think that helps yeah I get these things in

I can't remember where I read about it but sometime last year I was reading I think a book that was talking about the origins of oh it's a maybe I wonder if it's been published actually it was a a book that I read before release by David you weren't supposed to mention it you weren't supposed to mention it I don't know I think it's an NDA on that one is it oh no I don't know

there's some people have I want to say it was a David Craddock book, so it's probably out. Oh, was it part of that series? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that that was something David Craddock put together, a history of the Apple II and video games, and the Oregon Trail actually started out as like a game produced on teletype. Mainframe thing. Like in the early 70s, there were like these really simple computers,

and people would have to, like, input their text, and then it would print out, and they would look at it and be like, Oh, so that was our move, and then they had to figure out the next book. Yeah, it's all text-based. Actually, the Strong, the I-Chag at the Strong, which is up in Rochester, New York, just got a huge donation of Oregon Trail materials and mech stuff from the original author. They have, like, the source code and things like that. It's really neat.

But one thing, the last thing about the Oregon Trail is, I thought it was neat that you could put in the names of your family. And so we put in our classmates, and somebody would die of tetanus or diphtheria or whatever. Dissetary death, that's what it is. I like diphtheria, that's good. Yeah, diphtheria, vaccines. Yeah, so anyway, we need to wind down at this point. I know you guys have to go. But I was wondering if there were any final things you want to give a shout out to

before we wrap up this Apple 2 episode of Retronauts. Number Munchers was cool. That was very popular and influential at schools. Educational. At the same time, what more do you want? And there was word munchers. Better than Professor Pac-Man. Word munchers and other things.

Those were, that was, you know, that era, the whole throughout the latter half of the 80s and the early 90s was carried on by MEC making games for the educational market, that lifespan there. But it was influential, obviously, because lots, thousands and thousands of kids played those games. Yeah. So I think we've hit most of the ones that we had in my little grade school lab. And, you know, after I moved on, ended up with labs with Macs after that. So that'll have to be a different show. Yeah, I mean, we definitely should do a Mac episode.

But, yeah, beyond this, a lot of the games you get, pretty much all the games you get are multi-platform. Things like Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, pool of radiance. Those are all games. For the most part, yeah, that showed up on many, many platforms. So you can't really call them uniquely Apple 2. But they did show up on Apple 2. Like, this was a viable platform, an important place for,

game publishers and developers up through the end of the 80s and into the 90s. So that really speaks highly to the nature of the system and its success. And I think also a fine testament and a good way to end this episode out is to point out the fact that even though Apple produced its final system update for the Apple 2 in 1993, it actually received a new version of ProDOS, ProDOS 2.4, late last year right yeah it received a uh a final system update or maybe not final maybe there'll be another one uh but yeah 2016 a guy named john brooks put together prodos 2.4 yeah i have no idea

what that adds i have run it twitter or something no i've run it on the my 2c plus right when it came out um it it fixes some bugs but it also adds a neat little sort of menu launch your system where you can sort of use your cursor keys to scroll through a file system easily without typing commands that's really neat it's the apple two has a huge following um you know every year there's kansas fest which happens in kansas city um where a small group i say huge but you know as far as all computers go is very dedicated a small group gets together every year and they do apple two stuff and somebody just programmed a new programming language for it and they're still developing games for it and it's just incredible lives on forever

apple two forever that's what they say yeah definitely i mean it certainly seems to be that way and i i think it's a testament to the quality of the platform that many of those computers still work you know 30 40 years later uh you said you know your daughter was playing carotica right yeah so yeah compared to max they work great the max have bad capacitors and breaking plastic you know all kinds of problems well now they're made a metal yeah by God and they're not going to work either in like 10 years

oh well so it goes I'll just buy a new one that's the planned the planned obsolescence that's how it's built these days anyway so that wraps it up for the Apple 2 and for the debut episode

of Retronauts East East East So guys thanks for coming in taking time out of your afternoon You're welcome. It's my pleasure. That's great. And we'll try to do this once a month and talk about cool things

that maybe wouldn't get picked up at the normal Retronauts sessions. So for Retronauts, this is Jeremy Parrish. You can find me at Retronauts.com because that's where I work now. I'm on Twitter as GameSpite. Retronauts, of course, is supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts.

And the video section, Patreon.com slash GameSpite two ways to help us make video content or content, retrogaming content, yes. Anyway, that's enough about me, Venge. Don't forget, Patreon.com slash

Benj Edwards to support. And where would we find you on Twitter? Facebook, or Facebook? At Venge Edwards. I don't use Facebook. Vintagecom. Very good. Ben?

And I don't have a lot of presence right now. I'm on Twitter as Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N. If I ever get my stuff together enough to make some games, I'll be sure to let you all know, but don't have anything really up right now. All right. Thanks again, guys, and thanks everyone for listening. Hope you enjoyed it.

Sorry if there are audio problems. The next episode will sound better, I promise. And we'll be back in one more week with a full episode, I think, hosted by Bob. So look forward to that. Thanks again. I don't know. ...andau... ...their...

...this... ...that... ...you know.