what were your first game(s) bought for your A8

[bobotech]

I got my 400 around 82. Maybe late 81.

 

It was expensive at the time, still around 499 or 399 at Macy's and then you had to buy the Programmer kit.

 

The first game I bought was a cassette based Pac-Mac clone, a very well done clone of Pac-Man. Not Jawbreaker but another clone.

 

I loved that game. After it loaded, the screen would scroll down and play the intro music.

 

Then I got Star Raiders a short time after that.

 

Those were the fun days. God, how I love nostalgia.

[Chris Strong]

Missile Command, CXL4012. In fact, for the first six months, all I had was Missile Command and BASIC.

 

At the seven-month mark, I finally managed to get a 410. The first cassette program I bought was SCRAM. No more sadness when I was forced to turn the computer off and lose my program.

 

I think I got Centipede next, then Galaxian. But that was quite a while after I got the machine.

 

I remember very well driving (well, riding) home from a local store (Stokes Brothers) with Defender. I can't remember if I had some money, or my mother bought it for me. But I remember telling her about the game in the car.

 

I looked at buying the cartridge of Thorn Emi's Computer War at another store for months, but spent my money on De Re Atari and some other things instead. I can't remember what now, but it was a big deal to lose Computer War.

 

The Assembler Editor cartridge was another big one. My grandmother bought it for me, and I was so excited that when we went to dinner, I took the manual into the restaurant. I owe her a lot. I wish she had lived until I got my engineering degrees.

 

A year later, I walked down to a computer store to buy Pole Position, right after it came out. That took almost all of my birthday money (small store, high prices). I remember I had $60, which was a great sum for me. After Pole Position, I was down to under $10. When I told my father, he could not believe that I would spend $50 on a computer game. Mind you, that would be at least $100 in today's money.

 

I quite got my money's worth out of that cartridge, though. Played it a Whole Lot. Now I've got a full-sized Pole Position in my computer room.

 

Eastern Front 1941, another gift from my grandmother, was another major deal. I got the cartridge version and could save to my 410 before I got my 1050; I was the last person I knew to get a disk drive at home.

 

Other memories; buying Castle Wolfenstein. I bought the brand-new version in the box. It was behind the copies in the plastic bags. That store still had a lot of early versions of software in ziplock baggies or flat-packs. They had everything by Synapse, that's where I got my near-complete Synapse collection, one program at a time. If only I had purchased Dodge Racer.

 

Both that store (Computer College) and one of the Stokes Brother's stores had the Atari ERIC demonstration system. When Atari started to fade in 1983-4 Computer College cut up their ERIC cabinet and made it into shelves in the back. They took the laserdisk player home, but gave me all of the interface cards.

Edited October 30, 2008 by Chris Strong