Quest For the Screeching Relics
A dispatch from the War Room and some games from the dawn of time
My War Room, in one half of our basement, is a collection of a dozen or so computers, none newer than 1984. On the shelves behind each exhibit in my museum of obsolete tech – my Commodore Vic 20, my Radio Shack Color Computer 3, my Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, and so on – are boxes and bins of cassettes, disks, and cartridges, as well as out-of-print books full of BASIC program listings and product information.
Some people collect video games for rarity and resale, while others just want a nice piece of their childhood to revisit. While I do both of those things as well, there’s a weird archaeological bent to my curation. I’m fascinated with the absolute cave-painting beginnings of what is now this massive video game industry. Growing up when I did, I barely missed the era of curious nerds buying a computer at a department store, setting it up on their dining room table, and deciding “you know what? I’m gonna start a software company.”
The TI 99/4A is my platform of choice, the computer I played with at my uncle Greg and aunt Joan’s house before I ever had one, and the one whose magazines I’d stare at, imagining unlimited access to all 16K of that memory and all 32 columns of chockablocky text at my command. (The letter O is a square! So you can tell it apart from the zero! How cool is that??) The ads for Extended Software, Millers Graphics, Moonbeam Software, Kean Computing, and other forgotten pioneers are still burned in my mind. (I wrote about Not Polyoptics here recently.)
When I saw these two cassettes on Ebay last month – especially Missile Wars, dirty and smudged and without so much as a plastic case to protect it – I felt like Indiana Jones finding a sacred icon laying in the dirt on the side of a road. There was no way these tapes still worked, even an optimist with a shelf full of defiantly functional physical media had to accept that, but I couldn’t just let these get thrown out or lost in some reseller’s junk drawer.
I double-checked the list I keep to avoid buying doubles, went through the unsorted stuff (the War Room is better looking and more functional now than it’s ever been, but there are still boxes of things that need their day in the sun), and I bought the tapes. If I’d had them already, I probably still would have brought these rescues home.
They arrived looking as forlorn as their photos. I took them downstairs, loaded Missile Wars into the tape deck, booted up my TI 99/4A, and typed OLD CS1 to load a program in audio form. (You can actually hook up a CS2 and run with two tape decks, although almost no software took advantage of what would have been an insanely slow and cumbersome backup storage method.)
If you’ve never loaded a tape program into an old computer, imagine a fax machine churning rhythmically, almost hypnotically, a harsh electronic symphony similar to the old dialup modem sound from the AOL days. Now imagine that sound for anywhere from two to five minutes. Now imagine if there’s a bad spot on the cassette, or the player eats the tape, or any fluctuation in volume happens, and the computer loses the plot and you’re screwed.
The unthinkable happens – Missile Wars loads. DATA OK, the screen says, and I can hit STOP on the tape player and RUN my program. It’s a take on Missile Command, the classic arcade game, using the add-on Extended BASIC language that was all but essential for the TI. With the machine’s three-voice sound, 32 sprites, and sixteen colors of dazzling low-res graphics, the game is… well, let’s be honest. It’s a charming little piece of history but nobody’s going to embark on a marathon to rack up any high scores.
(And hey, it’s “Missile War,” singular, in the actual game, but who’s got time for proofreading when you’re saving the earth?)
Miracle of miracles, Pharaoh’s Tomb loads too! Another Extended BASIC creation, this one more suited to the tile graphics and slower speed of the TI 99/4A, this 1982 gem finds you traversing levels of a catacomb, triggering trap doors, and using limited drills to break through walls and loot treasure without awakening the Pharaoh’s tiny, Pac Man-esque ghost.
Here's the thing – both of these games are archived, well documented, and can be downloaded from the internet and played in an emulator on the same PC I’m using right now. But if you think that’s the point, you’re not a War Room type of person.
The Pharaoh’s Tomb tape in my hands now was probably hand-labeled in 1982 at Mr. Miller’s kitchen table, by a man driven to make colorful, fun games on a platform already showing its age and limitations, obsessed enough to learn to code on his own but not enough to look up how to properly spell “Pharaoh.”
Missile War(s) was either pro-duplicated or very professionally stamped, and sold by Asgard Software, a firm that sprung up after the 99/4A’s demise and valiantly attempted to provide it with new software well into the early 1990s. By ’85 you could get a Mac or an Atari ST or an Amiga 1000, and the next-level software for the Apple II and Commodore 64 ate the TI’s lunch, but someone was still trying to keep hope alive for anyone who’d committed to this plucky old computer yet still wouldn’t spring for a disk drive.
Millers Graphics went on to publish programming books and create the GRAM Kracker, the first piece of hardware allowing ordinary users to duplicate cartridge software to floppy disk. Asgard released a slew of TI titles, most interestingly Legends I and II, until recently the most elaborate and involved role-playing games ever devised on the platform. All of this is familiar lore to about two hundred people scattered across the globe, and to the rest of you, I could have just as easily made it all up on the spot.
But the time I spent loading these games in on “real iron,” as we say, and playing them as they’d have been played forty years ago, and then archiving them with my other wayward tapes come home… what a way to spend the day, as the song goes.
I don’t know if all this stuff will eventually find another War Room, or wind up back on Ebay courtesy of some intrepid estate sale hustler, but for now, at this moment in time, these pieces of folk art, these orphaned tapes, are safe at home with their kin, in all their junk-drawer glory.