While researching Moby Games for PCPP#139's Hardcore Quiz (yep, that's my job), I came across Captain Blood. Talk about awesome.

I won't bore you with the details of this seminal title, except to say that it reminded me incredibly strongly of the good old days. The good old days of non-standard hardware and elaborate setup menus where you had to choose the kind of EGA chip and sound card in your PC. Was your video VESA compatible? How about Ad Lib sound?

Another thing I noticed while researching the dark, distant PC gaming year of 1988 was that almost every game was released for a number of platforms. In the case of Captain Blood, it was PC, Amstrad, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Mac, and even ZX Spectrum (though probably without the sweet 16-colour graphics).

That's the way games were. They were tiny little endeavours made by dedicated drones at big publishing companies or by wild-eyed guys in their own garage. The user base was so tiny that they had to develop for multiple platforms if they hoped to make any money at all.

Contrast this with recent controversy surrounding Capcom's decision to offer Devil May Cry IV on the Xbox 360 as well as on the previously exclusive PlayStation 3. I could wax satirical here, but SomethingAwful.com already did.

For some reason, this also reminds me of the old Usborne programming books. Remember the ones? You could program a game for your Vic 20 with only 1000 lines of badly thought-out code.

Problem was, BASIC for each major home computer at the time (including an Australian-designed device called a Microbee) was slightly different to every other BASIC.

So I'd spend hours painstakingly typing in all these instructions, only to have the damn program not work because BBC BASIC was different to ZX Spectrum BASIC, and the book inadvertantly made me PEEK when I should have POKED. Ah, youth.

I eventually managed to get a text adventure (HAUNTED HOUSE!) working on a machine called an NEC PC-8021A. Here's a picture of one:


It was completely awesome in every way, including its 16K of onboard RAM and 256K RAM expansion cartridge. The screen may have only supported seven vertical lines of text*, but I pushed that little system to the extreme when I wrote an expansion for my Haunted House game (Six new locations! Hint: the diamond is hidden under the front steps! Type DIG STEPS to find it!) - the program bloated out to a massive 10K.

I also wrote what may have been one of the first ever Total Conversions for a game on the PC8021A. The game was called Tank where you, as a Tank, had to drive through a maze to shoot an enemy soldier, which would then make enemy bases vulnerable. Once you destroyed all the bases, the level ended. But an enemy Tank was out for you too!

I changed this to a game called Balloon! where you, as a sort of ET creature, had to find a pin so you could pop a series of Balloons! while an enemy ET thing (he was the enemy because he had little horns made up of exactly one pixel each) ran around trying to hit you with pies of his own.

I also added a menu system, level editor, and the ability to print out your high scores. Man that was an awesome machine.

In closing I would like to leave you with this image of the sticker on the front of the Captain Blood case. Awesome.


Damnit I need COLOR? That's my car budget blown again, on a $600 EGA card.