Super Mario Bros (NES)

Super Mario Bros. This game single-handedly changed how platform games were approached after it stormed onto the scene in 1985. It established so many conventions that people now expect in side-scrolling platform games. When you approach a new platformer, what is the first thing that you try to do to dispatch the enemies? You jump on them. And you are shocked if that doesn’t work, scrambling for the instructions to figure out why they programmed their game incorrectly. See something that looks like a gold coin? Collect them all. See a brick that doesn’t look the same as the rest of the bricks on a platform? Get below it and try to smash it with your head.

Even as the series progressed, and new features were added, such as more advanced moves and different costumes, the key principles of the game never changed.

But there’s a whole generation of platform games released before Super Mario Bros was even a twinkle in Miyamoto-san’s eye (maybe). And the game owes as much to the history of those who came before as current platformers owe to SMB. Let’s take a look at a handful of important platformers popular before the Super Plumbers came to the NES.

Donkey Kong (Arcade)

Donkey Kong

We can’t really do this without at least acknowledging where Mario came from. Donkey Kong was a 1981 arcade release from Nintendo. At the time, Nintendo’s North American arm was in desperate need of a hit after the release of Radar Scope, which had seriously underperformed in US arcades. Junior employee Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the concept for the game, giving it something that platformers lacked at the time: a story. A giant ape has kidnapped a construction worker’s girlfriend, and you must help him rescue her.

Of course, our protagonist isn’t Mario yet. Here he’s known as “Jumpman” for obvious reasons. The early concepts for the modern platformer are taking shape. Jump over the obstacles. Take the ladders as you progress to the goal. Use the power-ups you are offered along the way (the hammers). Donkey Kong even offered different levels with a variety of mechanisms to reach your goal. It’s no surprise that this game became an instant success, and it was ported to pretty much every console and computer of the time. We even got versions as LCD Game & Watch-style games and a tabletop VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) game from Coleco.

Pitfall! (Atari 2600)

Pitfall!

The Atari 2600 was a major success for the company, as the home console market began to move away from simple pong-style television games and toward cartridge-based systems that offered a world of different experiences, attempting to emulate the arcade at home. While Atari would release a slew of first-party titles for the system, some of the most successful games would come from third-party developers and publishers.  One of the most prolific of those publishers was Activision. They were notable not only for the amount, but more for the consistent quality of their releases. One of their early hits was the multi-screen platformer Pitfall!.

As a game, it was a simple concept. Travel from screen to screen,  jumping over rolling logs, coiled vipers, and scorpions, and catch vines to swing Tarzan-style across ponds and pits. Make sure to collect the treasure along the way, and try to get as many points as possible before the 22-minute timer reaches zero.

Pitfall! added a sense of adventure to the platforming formula, as you explored the jungle, always proceeding to the next screen to face whatever the game would throw at you. Adding the timer to the mix gave your quest a sense of urgency. It also gave the game an ending, where other games at the time would go on nearly infinitely, as long as you could stay alive.

Lode Runner (Commodore 64)

Lode Runner

In 1983, Broderbund published a new puzzle-platform game from developer Doug Smith, Lode Runner. Sharing similarities with the classic arcade game Space Panic, Lode Runner was a single-screen platformer set across 150 levels. The basic goal of each level was to collect all of the gold on each level while avoiding the roaming guards. Once all of the gold was collected, a ladder would appear at the top of the screen, allowing the player to exit to the next level.

There were a number of complexities to the gameplay formula that set Lode Runner apart from other puzzle games. The guards on the levels have the ability to pick up the gold you are trying to collect. You have the ability to temporarily create a hole next to you in the floor. You can drop through the hole to whatever lies below, or you can use the hole to capture one of the guards, and if he’s carrying gold, he will drop it. You can then walk over the guard and collect the gold. Your hole will eventually fill back in. Though the guards can eventually climb out of the holes, if they are unable to do so before the hole fills in, they will be forced to respawn at a random position at the top of the level.

The levels themselves are populated with ladders, hand-over-hand bars, and sections of floor that you will not be able to create a hole in. You cannot jump, but you can fall any distance without taking any damage, assuming, of course, that you don’t land on a guard. On some levels, the gold you need to obtain will be located deep beneath multiple layers of floor, forcing you to quickly create and drop through holes, all the while avoiding the ever-present guards. As you progress later into the game, the level puzzles become truly diabolical, but it’s so much fun that you just keep coming back for more.

Jet Set Willy (ZX Spectrum)

Jet Set Willy

Over on this side of the pond, we didn’t really get the ZX Spectrum. Though we did receive a version of the machine, released as the Timex Sinclair 2068, it never reached a fraction of the popularity that the Spectrum line achieved in the UK. The library of games made available for the line rivals that of the Commodore 64.

Developed by Matthew Smith and published by Bug-Byte (later Software Projects) in 1983, Manic Miner was one of the most popular platformers released for the ZX Spectrum. It was later ported to numerous other computer systems. The following year, Software Projects released Smith’s follow-up to the game, Jet Set Willy.

Miner Willy, tired and ready for bed, has to tidy the house after a party before he can turn in for the night. You go from screen to screen, exploring your mansion, locating all of the items you need to find in order to complete the game, and finally get a good night’s sleep. Jet Set Willy exploits features that would become popular in modern platformers: exploration and item collection. Often, if implemented poorly, these can be detrimental to a game. But, as long as the encompassing title is well done and engaging, preferably with an appealing story to go with it, exploration and collection can make for an enjoyable time. Jet Set Willy has these in spades.

Pac-Land (Arcade)

Pac-Land

When Pac-Man burst onto the arcade scene back in 1980, the little yellow maze runner quickly became a gaming phenomenon. He was on clothes, watches, wastepaper baskets, and even lunch boxes. Heck, he eventually got his own cartoon. When the inevitable sequels to the game came, they were all a variation of the maze-running, dot-chomping original (with the exception of the pinball-video-game hybrid that was Baby Pac-Man, but that’s for another article).

When Pac-Land was released in 1984, it marked the most extreme departure from the established Pac-Man formula to date. It was a side-scrolling platformer that had an anthropomorphized Pac-Man, similar to his design for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, making his way across stages, or “trips”, trying to complete a task related to the area he was in. Along the way, you had to avoid the Ghost Gang (Iny, Blinky, Pinky, Clyde, and Sue), as well as other obstacles like fire hydrants leaking water, fallen logs, and quicksand. When you find and eat a flashing Power Pellet, the ghosts will turn blue, and you will be able to eat them for points.

While Pac-Land wasn’t the first side-scrolling platformer developed prior to Super Mario Bros, it was a significant one. It put the character in a colorful land of platforms, as the player ran, jumped, and avoided obstacles. Each level had a goal, and there were even end-of-level challenges. It was reported that the game was a significant inspiration during the development of SMB, though Shigeru himself stated that, while he did take the game into consideration, the only concept he really borrowed was the use of a blue background, as opposed to the black backgrounds of his previous games. Regardless, Pac-Land proved that the formula that made Super Mario Bros a success could work.

Most truly great games owe something to the games that came before them. Super Mario Bros. is no exception. While it’s a classic, there’s a vast universe of platform games that are also worth your time and paved the way for the modern platformer.

The post Life Before the Plumbers – Platform Games Before Super Mario Bros appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

And nobody made that feeling more fun than Beagle Bros.

Beagle Bros.?

Beagle Bros had a very specific kind of genius. Their software and publications were useful, yes, but they were also funny, strange, stylish, and playful. They made Apple II programming feel less like homework and more like joining a secret club of clever people who knew how to make the machine dance.

Some of my favorite Apple II disks came from Beagle Bros. I loved DOS BOSS, which let you modify DOS commands and create your own custom commands. That idea was thrilling. The Apple II suddenly felt personal. You were not just using the operating system as delivered, you were bending it a little, renaming things, making it yours, and adding a bit of personality to the command line.

DOS BOSS diskette by Beagle Bros

Then there were the Beagle Bros posters, especially the ones filled with PEEKS, POKES, and CALLS. I had those on my wall as a reference for Apple II BASIC programming. If you were writing Applesoft BASIC, those charts were like having a wizard’s spellbook hanging above your desk. You could glance up, try a command, and suddenly the machine would do something new.

Two Liners

But my absolute favorites were the Beagle Bros Two-Liners. The name says it all, but it almost does not do them justice.

A Two-Liner was a complete Applesoft BASIC program squeezed into just two numbered lines. Not two short lines in a modern editor. Two Apple II BASIC program lines, packed with commands separated by colons, clever math, graphics routines, sound tricks, strange control flow, and sometimes outright mischief.

List 1 – Moonshot: Guess the launch power from 1 to 9. You get 5 tries.

10 HOME:N=INT(RND(1)*9)+1:W=0:PRINT"MOONSHOT":PRINT"FIND POWER 1-9"
20 FOR T=1 TO 5:INPUT"POWER";G:W=W+ABS(G=N):PRINT MID$("TOO HIGH! TOO LOW! BLASTOFF! ",1+10*ABS(G<N)+20*ABS(G=N),10):NEXT:PRINT MID$("MISSION FAILYOU REACHED ",1+12*ABS(W>0),12)

Moonshot listing and running on the Virtual ][ emulator

Tiny programs with big personalities

A good Two-Liner might draw a hypnotic hi-res graphics pattern. Another might make the disk drive chatter like a train. Another might create a little game, animation, puzzle, or oddball visual effect.

The point was not just to save space. The point was to see how much creativity could be compressed into the smallest possible form. That was the Beagle Bros magic.

The Two-Liners were funny, but they were also deeply educational. They taught you how Applesoft BASIC really worked. You learned how to chain statements with colons. You learned how FOR/NEXT loops could be squeezed into tight spaces, how expressions like ABS(A=B) could turn a true-or-false comparison into a usable number. How PEEK and POKE could reach outside ordinary BASIC and touch the Apple II hardware directly.

In other words, the Two-Liners taught programming through surprise.

That was very different from the dry way programming was often presented. A typical manual might explain a command, show a simple example, and move on. Beagle Bros did something better. They gave you something cool first. You would type in a tiny program, run it, and see something unexpected happen. Then, because the program was so short, you could actually study it.

Every character mattered, each shortcut had a reason and a simple colon was doing work – the code even invited you to reverse engineer it.

List 2 – “Treasure Map” Two-Liner: Guess the hidden treasure’s coordinates. Try to get close.

10 GR:X=INT(RND(1)*40):Y=INT(RND(1)*35):S=0:PRINT"TREASURE MAP":PRINT"FIND THE HOT SPOT"
20 FOR T=1 TO 6:INPUT"X";A:INPUT"Y";B:C=ABS(A-X)+ABS(B-Y):COLOR=1+14*ABS(C<5):PLOT A,B:S=S+ABS(C<5):PRINT MID$("COLD!HOT! ",1+5*ABS(C<5),5):NEXT:PRINT MID$("LOST!FOUND",1+5*ABS(S>0),5)

For a young programmer, or even just a curious Apple II user, Beagle Bros made experimentation feel safe and exciting. You did not need to build a giant program to feel like a programmer. You could type two lines and produce a visual effect. Learn one new POKE and feel like you had unlocked a hidden feature. Customize DOS commands with DOS Boss and realize that the computer was not fixed in stone. It was flexible, waiting for you.

The Two-Liners also represented a very specific kind of programming challenge. Today we might call it code golf, creative coding, or the demoscene spirit. But on the Apple II, it felt more homespun. It was not just about being clever for cleverness’ sake, but rather about understanding the machine so well that you could make something delightful with almost nothing.

That is why the Two-Liners still have charm. For me, that is the real legacy of Beagle Bros. They made learning code feel cool.

DOS Boss made the operating system feel customizable. The PEEKS, POKES, and CALLS posters made the Apple II’s hidden world visible. And the Two-Liners showed that programming could be playful, compact, surprising, and beautiful.

They were not just tiny programs. They were little invitations: Type this in. Run it. Laugh. Wonder. Change it. Break it. Fix it. Learn.

That was Beagle Bros at their best.

William W. Winter is the creator of Text Adventure Studio, where you can try your hand at making text adventures with a modern web-based design tool, and you can try it out and make your own text adventures for free at https://textadventurestudio.com. Old School Gamer Magazine readers can sign up for a free account. More articles from William can be found here.

The post Beagle Bros Two-Liners: A Coding Magic Trick appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

In this series, we’ll take a game that was ported to different platforms, pick five, and look at what went right, what maybe went wrong, and how they’re all related. First off, the classic Dan Gorlin game, Choplifter. We’ll be looking at the original Apple II, the Commodore 64 conversion, the arcade port, the Sega Master System version, and, finally, the Atari 7800 release.

Choplifter Apple II Screenshot

Apple II

Dan Gorlin developed Choplifter for the Apple II home computer system, with Brøderbund releasing the game in 1982. While action games of the time were often focused on how quickly the player could destroy everything on the screen, Choplifter instead focused on a more deliberate rescue operation, with destruction a result of defense rather than offense. The gameplay loop was deceptively simple: take off from your base, release the POWs from one of the four buildings on the level, and rescue as many as possible by picking them up and flying them back to your base, all the while eluding enemy vehicles.

The game was a remarkable achievement, with smooth graphics and animation, and a real feeling of gravity and inertia that you must come to terms with as you maneuver your chopper around the game field. Attempts to rescue POWs will be hampered by, among other things, tanks and jets, either trying to shoot you down or take out the POWs as they run from the busted barracks, scrambling to climb aboard the waiting helicopter. Don’t land too hard, or you’ll crash, killing everyone you’re carrying. Make sure you don’t land on any of the waiting POWs, or they end up in the kill column, as well. Your reward for getting them safely to your base? The grateful, cheery waves of the little fellas as they disembark your chopper.

As Apple tried to position the Apple II as more than just a business and educational machine, games like Choplifter helped cement it as a solid entertainment platform.

Choplifter Commodore 64 Screenshot

Commodore 64

A year after the game’s release on the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the new successor to Commodore’s successful VIC-20 home computer, received its very own version of Choplifter.

The game remained largely unchanged from the original. The gameplay loop was the same, as were the obstacles to success. The game underwent a few changes in presentation, including updates to the HUD at the top of the screen and a slightly darker color palette that better aligned with the Commodore 64’s available hues. The essential graphic elements were remarkably similar to those of the Apple II game, as were the animation and smooth gameplay. The feeling of gravity and inertia had been successfully translated, as well. From a gameplay standpoint, you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two.

The success of this port made Choplifter on the Commodore 64 a standard-bearer for quality games on the system for many years.

Choplifter Arcade Screenshot

Arcade

In 1985, Sega decided to bring Choplifter to the arcades. Instead of a straight port of the game, they redesigned it to take advantage of the more advanced hardware available to arcade games at the time and to appeal to the arcade gaming audience. Gamers would be looking for bright, colorful graphics with more detail than the original computer presentation.

The gameplay remained largely unchanged. You take off, fly to the left, dodging enemies, in search of the buildings housing the POWs you must rescue. Pick them up, survive the flight back to your base, and drop off the survivors. In addition to the enemy vehicles from the original version, there are now missile launchers and anti-aircraft guns to deal with, making each trip that much more treacherous. Another change from the original is that the number of successful rescues has been reduced to saving only 20 of 32. This, along with a fuel limit, helped increase the game’s pace while remaining challenging enough to keep the quarters flowing.

The backgrounds were detailed and used parallax scrolling to give the playfield a sense of depth. Instead of the single level of the original game, the arcade version of Choplifter took place on four different levels: the original desert level, a level at sea, a level in a cavern, and lastly a level on top of buildings. This, along with the redesigned vehicle graphics, helped it to stand out from the original and made it a true arcade classic.

Choplifter Sega Master System Screenshot

Sega Master System

When Sega brought Choplifter to their 8-bit NES competitor, the Master System, they chose to port their arcade version rather than the original computer game, as Coleco had done in 1984 for their ColecoVision system.

The decision to port the arcade version makes the Master System version more of an action game than the originals, in line with the arcade game. You face the same adversities as in the arcade game, but in an effort to increase the gameplay value of the home conversion, the POW rescue requirements are increased to 40. The graphics, while very similar to the arcade, are somewhat scaled back in color, detail, and background parallax levels. But they were (and still are) impressive for an 8-bit system.

The one thing that keeps this from being a truly epic conversion is something that plagues many Sega Master System games, especially action titles with many on-screen characters: sprite flicker. As the number of sprites on a horizontal plane increases, the sprite flicker increases as the system attempts to draw everything in place. When you are dealing with a large number of POWs roaming around on-screen, along with your chopper and possible enemies, it can get very distracting and can lead to some slowdown.

But, even this doesn’t detract from the fact that Choplifter on the Sega Master System is an excellent port, and one of the better arcade ports on the platform.

Choplifter Atari 7800 Screenshot

Atari 7800

Looking at it, you would be forgiven for assuming that the Atari 7800 version of Choplifter was another port of Sega’s arcade game. On the surface, the graphics seem more similar to the arcade version than to the original game. But this 1987 release is actually a port of the original computer game.

You are rescuing up to 64 POWs from four buildings of 16 scattered across the level, all the while on the lookout for enemies attempting to destroy you and your rescues.

The most obvious change is the graphic design. While not as detailed as the Sega Master System port of the arcade game, they are much more colorful and detailed than the Apple II original. It doesn’t play nearly as smoothly as the original or even the arcade version, but it is an important late release for a system that didn’t see many games before it was unceremoniously retired by Atari.

Bonus: Sega SG-1000

Though it didn’t see release outside Japan, a conversion of Choplifter was developed for Sega’s SG-1000 console (the predecessor to the Master System). Released in 1985, a few months short of Sega’s arcade version, it is essentially a slightly more complex version of the computer game. The graphics are very similar, with the monocolor chopper, minimalistic playfield design, and smooth animation. However, instead of the single level, it adds two more level types: a level that takes place at sea, where you rescue the POWs from lighthouse-looking buildings, and a cavern level similar to the level in the arcade and Master System versions.

Overall, the game plays quite nicely. It is too bad that we in the West didn’t get a chance to experience it. Choplifter for the SG-1000 would have been a great bridge between the computer classic and the arcade reimagining.

The post One Game, Five Systems – Choplifter appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Yes, distributed on cassette. Not a floppy disk, a cartridge, or a download. A cassette. The same basic kind of tape you might have used to record music off the radio and play in your Walkman.

To load it, you connected a cassette player to the Apple II, rewinded the cassette and pressed play. On the Apple II you typed “LOAD” and let the computer listen. What came out of the tape player was not music, at least not in the normal sense. It was a strange burst of squeals, chirps, and electronic warbling.

Apple II Reference Manual and the game Breakout on cassette

To modern ears, it sounds like a fax machine having a nervous breakdown, but to the Apple II, that sound was code.

Woz, Breakout, and 37 Lines of Code

The Apple II version of Breakout is especially interesting because of who wrote it. Steve Wozniak had already been involved with the original arcade version of Breakout during his Atari days, so seeing him bring the idea home to the Apple II gives the game a special connection to both arcade history and personal computing history.

Even better, the program is wonderfully tiny. The Apple II cassette version of Breakout is only 37 lines of Integer BASIC code. Thirty-seven lines. And it worked on a 4KB Apple II. Not 4MB – 4KB!

Today, that sounds almost ridiculous. A modern game might involve a giant engine, multiple asset folders, online accounts, updates, analytics, and a mountain of code just to show a title screen. Woz’s Breakout was small enough that a person could actually read it, study it, and understand how it worked.

That was part of the fun of early home computers, and the machine did not feel sealed off from you. It invited you in.

Paddle Power

Breakout itself is beautifully simple. You control a paddle at the left side of the screen and bounce a ball into rows of bricks at the right side. Break the bricks, keep the ball in play, and try not to miss.

The Apple II version used paddle controllers, which made perfect sense for this kind of game. Instead of pressing keys, you turned a knob. That gave the game a physical, arcade-like feel. Your hand was directly connected to the motion on the screen.

For a game about timing, angles, and tiny adjustments, that mattered. The paddle made Breakout feel less like typing instructions into a machine and more like actually playing an arcade game at home.

Color on a Home Computer

It may not sound shocking now, but this game was in color, and on an early home computer, that mattered. The Apple II’s color graphics were one of its defining features, and Breakout took advantage of that. Seeing colored bricks on a home computer screen or a TV was exciting. It gave the game personality.

Apple II game Breakout playing on an Apple //e

It also made the Apple II feel different. This was not just a business machine or a hobbyist kit. It could be playful,  visual, and could turn a television or monitor into a little arcade sitting right there on your desk.

Before Game Libraries Were Normal

What is easy to forget now is that there were not a lot of pre-packaged home computer games in those early days. You could not browse a digital store and download whatever caught your eye. Software distribution was still being figured out.

Some programs came on cassette. Later, more came on floppy disks. But many games came from books and magazines as printed listings. For example, see my post: Learning to Code in 1980: A Book, BASIC, and Pure Persistence.

That meant you might buy a magazine, find a game inside, and type the whole thing in yourself – line by line.
If the game did not run, you had to hunt for the mistake. Maybe you typed a zero instead of the letter O. Maybe you missed a colon. Maybe one number was wrong in one line somewhere, and the whole thing fell apart.

It could be frustrating, but it was also part of the experience. You were not just playing games. You were learning how they worked.

A Tiny Program, A Huge Moment

My original Breakout cassette feels like more than just a game. It feels like a snapshot of a moment when home computing was still new, playful, and wide open.

Wozniak’s 37-line Breakout showed what the Apple II could do: color graphics, paddle controls, arcade-style action, and programmable fun right in your own home.

It is primitive only if you compare it to today’s games. Measured by imagination, it is enormous.

Before app stores, cloud saves, patches, and downloads, there was a tape player, a cable, a blinking cursor, and the strange electronic song of a game coming to life.

William W. Winter is the creator of Text Adventure Studio, where you can try your hand at making text adventures with a modern web-based design tool, and you can try it out and make your own text adventures for free at https://textadventurestudio.com. Old School Gamer Magazine readers can sign up for a free account. More articles from William can be found here.

The post Breakout on Cassette: When Apple II Games Came Screeching Out of a Tape Player appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Jupiter Fracture Title Screen

In case you haven’t heard, the classic Commodore has undergone a rebirth. Retro computer YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson managed to gather the support and financing to purchase the bits and pieces of Commodore held by other companies and bring them together into the new Commodore International Corporation. The first major product from the company was the Commodore 64 Ultimate (C64U), a reimagining of the classic 8-bit powerhouse, functionally similar to the original with many modern quality-of-life improvements under the hood.

Bundled with the new systems was a USB drive (housed in a classic data cassette) loaded with games, apps, scene demos, and SID music files to play with. In addition, owners gained access to CommoServe, an online repository of software and media. This serves as a new distribution method for new software, as evidenced by the first game published by the new Commodore, Jupiter Fracture (stylized “Fract/ure”). The game is exclusive to C64U owners and users of the CommodoreOS Linux-based operating system.

Jupiter Fracture is a sequel to the classic Jupiter Lander game, originally released on the VIC-20 and later the Commodore 64 in the early 80s. In fact, the game was one of the earliest releases for the original Commodore 64. The game was part of the broader “lunar lander” genre, which ranged from text-only simulations to a popular vector-based arcade game. The concept was loosely based on the 1969 Apollo Lunar Module landing on the Moon. As your lander falls to the surface, you would use thrusters to overcome gravity and inertia to touch down safely at specified locations. As you used your thrusters, you would consume fuel, which made it more difficult as the game went on. Jupiter Lander changed the location from the Moon to the planet Jupiter, giving you three different landing pads on the lone level to bring your ship down on. While the game remained very simple, it was incredibly popular, and is still looked upon fondly by those who played it as new C64 owners back in the day.

Jupiter Fracture Levels

Fast-forward to 2025, and Jupiter Fracture picks up where the original left off. The story goes that on April 29, 1994, the planet Jupiter experienced a mysterious event called The Blip, which fractured the planet into a number of floating fragments. As the last surviving lander pilot, it is up to you to explore each of these fragments, land, and discover the secret behind the mystery of The Blip.

Each of the planetary fragments is composed of different material, contains different hazards, and is affected by gravity differently. You will need to navigate the narrow underground corridors of each level, avoiding obstacles such as lasers, force fields, and even mines. If you hit a wall, run into a hazard, come down too hard, or miss a platform, you will lose a ship. Just like in the original, successfully landing on a pad will earn you bonus fuel, which will be important, as the multiscreen levels are much more complex than in the original game. The slower and more accurate your landing, the more points and bonus fuel you receive.

One notable change, aside from the expanded gameplay levels, is the method of controlling your ship. In the original Jupiter Lander, you had three thrusters that you used to control your ship: a downward-facing thruster that controlled descent and ascent, and two lateral thrusters that controlled horizontal movement. In the sequel, the control has shifted back to the method used in the original Lunar Lander arcade game. Lateral movement now requires rotating in the opposite direction and thrusting, making landing that much harder.

Jupiter Fracture Level 1

This game is a great sequel to a classic title. The vastly expanded gameplay helps to elevate this game beyond the simplistic goals of the original. The addition of hazards on each of the nine levels keeps the gameplay loop from becoming stale. Even though there are only nine levels, the later ones are quite tricky, and once completed, there is still the challenge of improving your score on the next run through the game.

The sound effects are standard thruster fare, but the music is vastly expanded over the original. The compositions use the familiar themes from Jupiter Lander, but do an excellent job of making them modern and interesting. As a release intended for the C64U’s expanded audio capabilities, the game also supports dual SIDs for an even more expansive aural experience.

If there is one criticism I can level at Jupiter Fracture, it is the transition from the zoomed-out level to the zoomed-in landing view. The original game had very simplistic level graphics, so zooming in during landing didn’t seem so jarring. But here, the change from what you see around you in the full-level view to the landing view can be very different, forcing you to make sometimes split-second decisions about your descent that you didn’t initially see. Also, the sense of inertia does not always carry over well from one view to another, with slower momentum while zoomed in translating to much faster momentum in the full-level view. It is not insurmountable and doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the game, but it could certainly be addressed in future versions.

If you own a C64U, you have no excuse not to download Jupiter Facture and give it a try. It’s a great experience, and the game’s overall story is a fun analog of the death and rebirth of Commodore itself. Happy landing!

The post Review: Jupiter Fracture for the Commodore 64 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

While they started out focused on hardware access, MECC soon transformed into an educational software publisher. Their most famous educational game has become a household name, and Generation X and Millennials will certainly have heard of and played some of their other titles. Let’s take a look at some of the most influential MECC educational games.

Oregon Trail – Apple II

Oregon Trail

The endlessly meme-able historic simulation that put educational gaming, or edutainment, on the map. The development of this game actually predates MECC by a few years. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger created the first version in 1971 for Rawitsch’s eighth-grade history class. Rawitsch joined MECC in 1974, and the game was added to the MECC system in the mid 70s. In 1985, it became a much larger stand-alone product for the Apple II. What made it important was not just popularity, but form. The Oregon Trail turned history into a decision-driven survival simulation, so students learned through trade-offs, scarcity, geography, and consequences rather than memorization alone. It remained central to MECC for decades and ultimately became the company’s defining cultural artifact.

Word Munchers

Introduced in 1985, Word Munchers was one of the games that proved MECC could make drill-oriented learning feel genuinely playful. It won a Parents’ Choice Gold Award that year. Later deluxe versions expanded it into a broad language arts package covering reading, grammar, vocabulary, phonics, parts of speech, and related word skills. In students’ memories, this is one of the quintessential school lab games because it wrapped language practice in fast, arcade-style pressure, using a gameplay style that vaguely emulated the popular Pac-Man.

Number Munchers – MS-DOS

Number Munchers

This was the math counterpart to MECC’s Word Munches and another of their signature games. Number Munchers was a Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner in 1986, and later one of the company’s first titles to span Apple II, Macintosh, and MS-DOS. In design terms, it distilled arithmetic and number sense into a quick chase format built around factors, equalities, and similar rule recognition, which is exactly why it stuck in so many students’ memories.

Storybook Weaver

This title is important because it reveals a different side of MECC’s educational philosophy. MECC listed Storybook Weaver among its new titles in 1990, then later reintroduced it for Mac and Windows and expanded it into Storybook Weaver Deluxe, which combined it with My Own Stories and added more art and technical features. Instead of teaching through simulation or drill, it emphasized authorship, composition, illustration, and multimedia storytelling. For many students, this was MECC at its most open-ended and creative.

Odell Lake – Apple II

Odell Lake

Odell Lake shows MECC was never only about frontier history and word drills. MECC later grouped it with The Oregon Trail and Number Munchers as one of its “Programs of the Decade,” and Odell Down Under was explicitly marketed as an expanded successor to the “classroom classic” Odell Lake. Its importance lies in the fact that it taught ecology through systems and survival. The game focused on predator-prey relationships, recognition, and environmental consequences rather than on simple question-and-answer prompts.

MECC was responsible for many other titles, including several Oregon Trail sequels. Unfortunately, in the mid-90s, MECC underwent a consolidation and was acquired by SoftKey. In 1996, the company was renamed The Learning Company, and by 1999, it had been shuttered altogether. Today, a variety of companies own the trademarks for MECC’s software library, with Oregon Trail continuing to appear in various forms on many modern platforms.

The post MECC: When Generation X Got to Play Games in School appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Infinity Blade for PC

As I was browsing Reddit the other day, as I’m wont to do from time to time, I came across a post about something of great interest to me that I knew nothing about. The post discussed the release of a PC port of Infinity Blade II. For the uninitiated, the Infinity Blade series of games was released for iOS devices starting in 2010. The three games in the series were among the most graphically impressive to be released for iOS devices at the time and were extremely popular. Unfortunately, due to difficulties adapting the games to the newer hardware Apple was releasing, and Epic Games losing their license to publish games on the App Store, developer Chair delisted them from the App Store rather than abandon the titles. The unfortunate consequence of this decision, and the reason I bring it up here, is that these glorious games have become “lost media” since they can no longer be downloaded from the App Store, not even onto hardware that once supported the games. If you purchased these games and didn’t have them already installed on a device, they were simply gone.

Lost media in the video game world is far from a new issue, given the ephemeral nature of digital marketplaces. While we believed for decades that physical media, whether cartridges, floppy disks, or CD/DVD/GD-ROM/etc, meant we permanently owned the games we purchased, as time marches on, we are finding that this is not necessarily the case. No matter what we do to store our bits and bytes, entropy always finds a way. Whether it’s corrosion of IC boards, failure and leakage of backup batteries, bit rot slowly destroying magnetic media, or degradation of optical discs (yes, even Blu-ray discs eventually), physical media is not the permanent paradise we were promised.

My Abandonware Site

Some of the earliest efforts to preserve these pieces of gaming history fell to websites like My Abandonware, which host digital archives of sometimes fragile, hard-to-source software packages. Of course, this has always ended up in a legal grey area. Technically, these games, even though they are no longer actively being sold on the market, are often still owned by some company somewhere. These sites, in an attempt to remain legally compliant, will often capitulate to companies that request/demand that their games be removed from the archives.

Fortunately, the game preservationists over at Good Old Games have stepped in to try to offer a fully legal way to experience some of these classic titles. Working with IP owners, they have built an extensive library of classic computer games that are fully playable on modern hardware, often using emulation layers such as DOSBox. Given that this is a digital marketplace, you may be worried that games could disappear, as with Capcom’s digital release of Marvel vs. Capcom or Ubisoft’s The Crew, but fortunately, that isn’t the case here. While games are sometimes removed from sale, such as the classic rally racer Colin McRae 2005 (often due to rights issues), these games are never removed from the libraries of those who purchased them. And, even if you are unwilling to believe that, GOG allows you to download the full install binaries for any games that you own in your library, allowing you to keep a personal archive of your purchases, 100% legal and free of any reliance on the GOG ecosystem. This system is a huge win for game preservation.

But what about games that were never released on physical media?

This is not necessarily as new a problem as you might think. In the ’90s, both Sega and Nintendo dipped their toes into digital software distribution, much of it exclusive to their digital-only platforms. Nintendo’s platform, known as the Satellaview, was a satellite service that attached to the Super Famicom. Users were able to access a library of games that eventually totaled 114 titles. Some were original games or original sequels to cartridge releases, while others were remakes of older Famicom and Super Famicom titles. In addition, some games, known as Soundlink games, had to be played “live” on a set schedule because they used live voice acting. While most standard digital-only titles have been preserved in the memory of various Satellaview systems, some content, such as the live audio from the Soundlink titles, is likely to be permanently lost.

The Sega Channel

Sega launched the Sega Channel in 1994. Using a special adapter that plugged into the Genesis’ cartridge slot, users would connect to the coaxial cable from their cable service provider, with either TCI or Time Warner Cable being the only two providers supporting the service in the US. Since the service used the existing cable infrastructure rather than an online service like the Stellaview, online gaming was not supported. The available games were broadcast on a loop. Once the user requested a title, the system would wait for the broadcast to loop to the selected game, then capture the data. The game would be saved to the adapter’s internal RAM, which was wiped when the system was powered off. Since the adapter used volatile RAM to store the games, preservation had been a challenge. Fortunately, in 2025, the Video Game History Foundation released over 140 ROMs from the Sega Channel, including exclusive games and demos that had never been released on physical media. These archives were obtained from the former Sega Channel VP of Programming, Michael Shorrock, and from a fan who had collected backup tapes of Sega Channel broadcasts.

Digital marketplaces are a current issue and will remain one going forward.

As consoles entered the 7th generation, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all opened digital marketplaces for their devices. This is where console users really began to see the potential negative consequences of software’s digital-only distribution. Each of the online shops experienced a number of titles being delisted. Fortunately, if you had purchased the game, it remained in your library, and you could redownload it later. But quite often, these titles never reappeared on subsequent systems or other platforms, especially Nintendo titles. Without a physical release, these games became relics of the aging accounts that originally purchased them. It wasn’t unusual to see listings on places like eBay for systems and, sometimes, marketplace accounts that included some of the more popular delisted titles.

Wii Shop

The next ticking time bomb for these legacy systems is the ability to access digital purchases in the future. Right now, if you have an old account with purchases on the PS3, PSP, Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U, DSi, or 3DS, you can (with varying levels of difficulty) migrate these accounts to other physical systems. It’s not unusual for people to sell their systems when they go unused or when they decide to upgrade to the next-generation console. If you later decide to purchase these older consoles again, you can currently redownload your purchases, allowing you to access your legacy libraries. But, at some point, it will not make financial sense to support downloads for legacy consoles. Once those points of access are shut down, hundreds of titles will exist only on the non-volatile memory and hard drives of specific systems. And emulation will remain the sole way to experience some of these titles going forward, assuming the media has been rescued from one of these orphaned systems.

Of course, digital marketplace death is not exclusive to consoles. Mobile devices have long dealt with delisted software. Often, these titles remain in users’ purchase histories, but several high-profile titles from the past were not only delisted but also removed from users’ accounts. This meant that if the user deleted the app from their devices, they would have no opportunity to redownload it. Android users had it a bit easier. If they could find someone hosting an older APK of the app they could no longer access, they had a chance to reinstall it on their device. But iOS users, with Apple’s walled-garden architecture, found it much more difficult to access these digital assets that had disappeared.

And that’s not to mention the PC gamers who have lost purchases on storefronts like Steam, the Epic Store, and EA and Ubisoft’s own storefronts. These aren’t 99-cent app purchases, either. We’re talking AAA, full-priced titles that are no longer accessible to the users who paid good money for them. This doesn’t even begin to touch the other doom hammer, online gaming services. While many games rely on no online services, others have limited integration, and still others are fully reliant on internet-based services for game matching, content delivery, and multiplayer gameplay. When companies decide to shut down those servers, some games will lose functionality, while others will become completely unplayable.

Evercade EXP-R

So, what can we do? The most obvious option is to support companies that offer physical options for their games, specifically those that do not rely on an online service to play on the device. While Nintendo’s “key cards” have drawn some controversy for not including the game on the physical card, many games released for the Switch and Switch 2 are stored entirely on their cards. Another player that has entered the physical media space is Blaze Entertainment, with its Evercade line of retro systems. They have no digital marketplace. Every game they release is a physical cartridge featuring licenses from many popular companies, as well as indie retro-inspired titles. While they have had to stop producing older carts due to expiring licenses, it is the pinnacle of “you bought it, you own it”.

You can also support organizations like Good Old Games and the Video Game History Foundation, which are working to preserve and make these once-lost and abandoned titles available. When it comes down to it, the corporations aren’t going to preserve the long, unique history of video games. It is going to be up to us, the gamers, to keep it alive.

The post Musing of a Retro Gamer: Lost Media and Game Preservation appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

I was 13 in 1980. Back then, at home, our family had an Apple II Plus, but not a lot of software – especially we had very few games to play.

But pretty much every computer had BASIC as a default programming language. This allowed you to write your own programs. From a simple “Hello” to anything you could dream up.

And we wanted to play games – wait – we wanted to make games!

In the early days of home computing, if you had a home computer, there’s a good chance you knew about the book BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl. It was unlike anything else at the time.

The cover of BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl

It wasn’t a book you read and put back on the shelf. The pages were filled with listings for simple but surprisingly engaging games, and the only way to experience them was to sit down at your computer, type in the listing and bring them to life one keystroke at a time. For a lot of people, like me, it was their first real introduction to detailed computer code. If they didn’t realize it at the time it quietly taught you how code worked while you were just trying to get a game to run.

You didn’t just read code. You had to transcribe it slowly, carefully, and almost always, imperfectly. The first time you ran it, it didn’t work – gosh, it never worked the first time!

The “Chomp” page from BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl

You’d get a syntax error. The cursor would just come back, like the machine was politely telling you that you missed something obvious. So you went hunting line by line, character by character – was it a missing quote? A mistyped variable? A number out of place?

Somewhere between retyping line 120 for the third time and realizing that “O” and “0” were not the same thing! You stopped just copying code… you started understanding it!

• Why did line 50 send you back to line 10?
• What did GOTO really do?
• Why did changing a single number make the game easier… or impossible?

You began to experiment. Carefully at first. Then with more confidence.
Change the fuel amount from what was listed in the printout.
Increase the speed variable. Rewrite a message to include a friend’s name just to see if you could.
That’s when it stopped being their game and started becoming yours.

The “Super Star Trek” page from BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl

I loved the Apple II because it didn’t try to hide anything from you. It didn’t abstract the experience. It handed you the raw material and said, “Figure it out.”

And with of BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl you had a map. Not a clear one, but enough to get lost in.
No internet to check answers. No forums. No videos explaining what you did wrong. Just you, the machine, and the quiet realization that if it didn’t work, it was probably your fault. And if you stuck with it long enough, you could fix it.

Maybe that was the real lesson. Not BASIC the language. BASIC the mindset. Patience, precision, and curiosity – and a kind of stubbornness.

The moment one of those programs finally worked: No errors! The game responded! The game played! What a feeling.

It wasn’t flashy. By today’s standards, it was barely anything at all. But I knew every line that made it happen. I had earned it. That mattered to me.

Looking back now, it’s easy to forget how direct that experience was. Today, everything is layered. Tools on top of tools. Frameworks, APIs, abstractions. It’s powerful, no question. But back then, there was nowhere to hide. If something broke, you were close enough to the problem to understand why.

That is why, every once in a while, I go over to my Apple II sitting there, just waiting. And that of BASIC Computer Games book, worn at the edges, pages falling out, full of someone else’s ideas that became my own the moment I typed them in. And I some of them in again.

William W. Winter is the creator of Apple II Adventure Studio, where you can try your hand at making text adventures with a modern web-based design tool. You can try it out and make your own text adventures at: https://textadventurestudio.com
Old School Gamer Magazine readers can sign up for a free account.

The post Learning to Code in 1980: A Book, BASIC, and Pure Persistence appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

One day, just a little while back, while working together in a meeting with engineering and operations teams, my friend used the phrase “Let’s look behind the rocks and see if there are any scorpions,” referring to any hidden challenges we’d need to uncover in the development process before the work began in earnest.

Of course, I had to smile and laugh a bit. I knew exactly where that phrase came from.

If you don’t, read on. And if you did, here’s my story about that phrase.

We both had Apple II computers back then and would spend hours playing all sorts of games. His favorites were more action games like “Autobahn” by programmer Nasir Gebelli and published by Sirius Software in 1981.

Autobahn by Nasir

My favorites were adventure games – both text adventures and graphical adventures.

One of my favorites then – and now – was always “The Wizard & the Princess” designed by Roberta Williams and programmed by Ken Williams of On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line, even later Sierra Entertainment), released in 1980.

The Wizard & the Princess was one of the first full color graphical adventures. When playing the game an image of the current location and objects were shown in Apple II hi-res graphics, with four lines of text at the bottom showing descriptions and command entry.

I won’t go into a complete description of the game, but the game starts in the desert village of Serenia. As you try to progress through the adventure (spoiler alerts ahead!) your path is blocked by a rattlesnake. There’s no way to move past this snake and continue the game until you neutralize this threat!

The Wizard and the Princess Snake

So, you move around the map to other places in the desert and notice something: some desert locations have a rock in the scene. “Great!” you think, and type “TAKE ROCK” – and that’s when it happens … you’re dead.

No buildup. No warning. Just “a scorpion behind the rock has stung you.” Game over. Because, of course, there was a scorpion hiding behind the rock.

That was the moment – from then on, you didn’t trust anything at face value. Every rock became a question mark.

Now aware there can be scorpions hiding behind rocks, you can “LOOK ROCK” to see the scorpion first.

The Wizard and the Princess Scorpion

Find a rock without a scorpion behind it, “TAKE ROCK” on that scene to add it to your inventory, and go back to the rattlesnake. Eliminate the threat of the rattlesnake by throwing the rock at it. From there you move on to the next challenge of The Wizard & the Princess.

But the real takeaway wasn’t solving the puzzle. It was the habit: don’t assume the obvious thing is safe. Check first.

So, hearing that phrase again, all these years later, in a totally different context, was kind of perfect. Because that’s exactly what we were doing. Looking for the hidden problems before they bite us.

It’s funny how that stuff sticks with you. The old games didn’t hold your hand. They just let you fail and then expect you to learn from it. And apparently, decades later, we’re still using those lessons.

So yeah, whenever something looks simple, obvious, “just grab it and go” …
Maybe take a second. Look behind the rock first.

So now, when I’m looking for a phrase that means “let’s see if there are any unexpected or hidden obstacles,” I also use “let’s look behind the rocks and see if there are any scorpions.”

You can as well.

William W. Winter is the creator of Apple II Adventure Studio, where you can try your hand at making text adventures with a modern web-based design tool. You can try it out and make your own text adventures for free at: https://textadventurestudio.com
Old School Gamer Magazine readers can sign up for a free account.

The post A Scorpion Behind the Rock – Then and Now appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Fort Apocalypse Title Screen

Early in my video gaming life, one of the first computer games I ever played was Dan Gorlin’s classic Choplifter on my cousin’s Apple II. The simple presentation, on that glowing monochrome green CRT, was instantly addictive. When we got our Commodore 64 some time later, it was one of the first games I sought out. I was pleasantly surprised that the game translated nicely to the C64, but that is a story for another article. More important to this article is the game a friend of mine introduced me to, not long after that. The game seemed to me to be an evolution of the Choplifter formula I had fallen in love with: rescuing people, but now with the added challenge of more advanced combat, as well as navigating underground caverns. That game was Fort Apocalypse, published by Synapse Software. While I later found out the game wasn’t quite what I’d assumed, it didn’t change my opinion. That opinion remains all these years later.

First off, it is commonly assumed (as I did) that Fort Apocalypse is simply a more advanced Choplifter clone. Designer Steve Hales has gone on record to refute that, stating that he actually developed the concept for the game nearly 6 months before Gorlin’s hit came on the scene. He claims the idea for the game came from a dream about helicopters. The game was originally developed for the Atari 8-bit line of micros, and Synapse released the initial version in 1982. The C64 conversion, ported by Steve Hales, was released a year later. The game’s visual aesthetic is strongly informed by its Atari 8-bit roots, giving it an early-’80s action-game look and feel. But don’t let the looks distract you. This game is interesting, challenging, and, more importantly, fun.

Fort Apocalypse

Starting off at the top of the cavernous Fort Apocalypse, you must descend into the depths, rescuing prisoners. avoiding and taking out enemies, and dodging obstacles along the way. As you descend through the levels of caves, you must use your rockets and plasma bombs strategically to eliminate the obstructions between you and the goal on the bottom level, which will send you even deeper into the fort. But make sure to keep an eye on your fuel level. If it gets too low, you’ll have to head back to the fueling station to refuel before continuing your descent. Once you make it to the final room, you use a well-armed rocket to destroy the fort. But, you’re not finished. You must then make it back through the caverns, avoiding the same obstacles and enemies that hindered your initial progress, to the exit to actually win the game.

Something that makes Fort Apocalypse more than your bog-standard shooter is its strategic elements. First, your weapons are not controlled by different firing triggers, as they are in other games. They are instead determined by your helicopter’s orientation. If you are facing sideways, your chopper will fire its rockets. But when you rotate to face the screen, you will drop your plasma bombs. This adds a challenge to the cramped combat conditions deep in the caverns. You’ll need to rotate to drop your bombs to destroy the barriers allowing you access to the deeper levels of the fort, but at the same time, you’ll need to rotate sideways to fire rockets as enemies eventually appear from off-screen to eliminate you.

Fort Apocalypse

Helping you in combat and navigation is your navatron radar system. Similar to the early-warning radar system in Defender, you see a miniaturized version of approximately 6 times more area than you can see on the main screen, showing you enemies, barriers, and prisoners to be rescued. This really helps as you plan your movements through the game, and is essential, should you make it as far as destroying the fort, for finding your way back out to the surface.

As I said at the beginning of the review, the game may look primitive, but that belies its strategic gameplay and “just one more time” playability. Fort Apocalypse does what the best retro games do: balance difficulty with gameplay that is not so frustrating as to make you rage-quit and never come back to it. If you give it a chance, you will find yourself sinking hours into the game, trying to make it further into the caverns of the fort before you’re blasted by a missile launcher or crushed by a moving wall. I won’t say that a controller or two wasn’t lobbed across the room at times back in the day, but I always picked it up again and gave it another go.

While it wasn’t inspired by the classic, Fort Apocalypse benefits from the familiarity with the rescue gameplay that Choplifter made famous. But it expands on the concept, giving us a game that is part Choplifter, part Spelunker, part Scramble, and all fun. Definitely seek this one out if you’re looking for a retro shooter challenge.

The post Retro Review: Fort Apocalypse for the C64 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.