Interesting. I remember seeing the TRS-80 on sale back in the 80s. I never had one though. I had an Apple IIc, or rather, my parents had one and I used it from time to time.
My earliest home games: the TRS-80 Model I
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 On 03/09/2016 at 10:30 PM by SanAndreas See More From This User » |
I have been around computer and video games for almost my entire life. My first gaming experiences I can remember were with the Donkey Kong, Dig-Dug, and Ms. Pac-Man machines at the Vekol Commissary in Maricopa, Arizona, near where I lived at the time. However, I never had an Atari 2600 at home, though my cousin in Gilbert had one. Instead, I got a lot of my home gaming fix on home computers, at least until I got my first Game Boy in 1989.
The first of these computers was the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I computer. Ours boasted a monochrome blue-and-white monitor, a floppy disk drive, a cassette tape drive (computer programs really used to come on the same audio cassettes you listened to in your Sony Walkman!) and a whopping 4K (yes, K as in a unit of approximately 1000 bytes of memory) of RAM. My dad spent another $200 on a huge Expansion Interface to boost it up to a massive 16K! Mad, eh? But back then, my 3-5 year old self was just impressed with the ability to make objects on a TV screen move.
I learned a little BASIC programming in my youth, but my real passion, was of course, games. Most of the games on the TRS-80, like most computer and video games that weren't on Atari machines back then, were knockoffs of popular arcade games. Most of them were cheesy, with the TRS-80's limited graphics abiities cheesifying them further, but some of them were actually decently competent. In addition to graphics limits, the TRS-80 only had sound if the special Radio Shack cassette player was hooked up to it, and sometimes the sound signals would play through my dad's black-and-white TV through RF interference, much to his annoyance and my amusement. Here are the games I can remember.
Spooks
A knockoff of Pac-Man. Being that the TRS-80 lacked color, the ghosts were all white blobs. That said, this game was arguably better than Atari's "official" Pac-Man for the 2600, but I don't think people were quite that analytical back then in demanding arcade perfection.
Penetrator
Penetrator was a knockoff of Scramble, a side-scrolling shooter by Konami. You flew a jet plane over rough, craggy territory firing a machine gun and dropping bombs, trying to avoid missiles and kamikaze drones. In the last stage, you had to drop a bomb into the nuclear reactor of the enemy base before you few over the vent, at which point you'd be treated to a lot of monochrome pyrotechnics. Penetrator added one twist to the Scramble formula: You then had to fly all the stages in reverse. Eventually after a few plays due to some glitch, the enemy castle's reactor port would close up completely, even if you started a new game, and you'd have to reboot the computer and start over. This was one of my favorites.
Vaders
Guess which game this was a knockoff of. Three guesses and the first two don't count.
Caterpillar
This game was a knockoff of Centipede, where you would shoot at the titular caterpillar (made of ASCII zeroes with an @ for a head) in a maze full of white t-shaped mushrooms. That one was my mom's favorite game.
Olympic Decathlon
This game was actually made by a very young Microsoft just a few years after Bill's famous Albuquerque arrest, if I'm not mistaken. The standard ten events where you'd mash the keyboard repeatedly since nobody could figure out a better mechanic to simulate running in sporting events.The 1500M run was tedious as hell.
Galaxy Invasion
This was actually a pretty competent clone of Galaxian, made by a company called Big 5 Software run by a couple of teenagers in Van Nuys, California. Big 5 would later go on to make a popular platformer, Miner 2049er, for more advanced computers with color graphics, and it's nominally still in existence today. The big feature in this game was the "Flagship". Every couple of minutes, the screen would start flashing a "Flagship Attack Alert!" message. If you didn't kill the Flagships in a certain amount of time, they would fire lasers at your ship and blow you to bits.
Scott Adams Adventures
No relation to the Scott Adams who draws the Dilbert comic strip, Adams wrote a series of twelve or so text adventures that were ported to a lot of different computers in the early 80s, with games like Adventureland, Pirates' Adventure, Voodoo Castle, and Strange Odyssey. Compared to Infocom's text adventure games like Zork, Adams' games were very bare-bones, with the player able to interact with the game only with a two-word parser. Still, they were memorable enough.
Bee Wary
One of the few TRS-80 games I know of that wasn't a knockoff. You played the role of a bee doing battle with a spider. Your bee had to fly over the spider and try to sting it without getting eaten by the spider, which would jump up and try to eat your bee. Your bee would get tired if you took too long and you would lose control, allowing the spider to eat you. The bee and the spider would trade insults with each other in text.
And that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed this little trip through memory lane. In the future, I may write more blogs about my pre-Nintendo gaming experiences. Until next time, kiddies...
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