When We Were Young

I grew up when computer data was measured in bits and bytes. The mobile phone I currently use has more memory than my first computer (a Commodore 64), which in turn was more powerful than the computers that plotted the trajectories of the Apollo missions to the moon. Let me take you back...

In 1988 I was living with my mum and her partner in a suburb of Brisbane called McDowell. we were renting the place, a fact that my friends never let us forget. I had friends from up the street, two boys my own age, who thought they could take my bike and ride it whenever they wanted, because "renting" to them meant we didn't own anything. I wonder at the elitist bullshit their parents let slip to give their kids such an elitist view. They'd probably voted for Sir Joh.

My dad worked for Telecom, which would become Tesltra in later years when the government sold it off. He drove around and picked us up once a fortnight and we spent a weekend with him. On my birthday in that year he brought us a Commodore 64 and a handfull of games to play on it. There were cartriges that plugged into the back of the unit like the game cartriges of later consoles like the Sega Mastersystem, and there was a cassette drive that read bits and bytes recorded on an ordinary cassette and decoded them into computer programs that woulod run in the machines 64 k RAm drive. It was an 8 bit system with one advantage over the consoles of the early nineties: you could use it to program your own games, if you had the know how.

BASIC was the programming language built into the C64. The first program I wrote for the machin ran exactly as follows:

10 PRINT "MY NAME IS DAVID"
20 GOTO 10

This program resulted in the following screen printout in cyanon dark blue:

MY NAME IS DAVID
MY NAME IS DAVID
MY NAME IS DAVID
MY NAME IS DAVID
MY NAME IS DAVID
MY NAME IS DAVID
MY NAME IS DAVID

... and onward ad infinitum. It was an infinite loop you could stop by tapping the "Run Stop" key. I had a lot of fun trying different sentences with the same programming syntax. when my parents weren't home, I programmed vulgar things. If you put a semicolon at the end of the PRINT command, it would fill the whole screen. That was how I ended up with:

SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT

... onwards and onwards. I was only eight, after all.

The games I played were simple by todays standards, my favorites being "Wizard of Wor" in which you shot demons in a maze of ever elabourating difficulty, and such clasics as "Frogger" and "Dig Dug". Recently I completed "Assasins Creed" on the XBox 360. There was nothing so complicated back when I was a kid. The most elaborate game I ever played on the C64 was called "Echelon", about exploring the tenth planet of the solar system, called Isis, in a space ship. Todays "sandbox" games of total freedom like Grand Theft Auto and Spiderman 2 are probably the closest analogisms to Echelon. You flew about on this alien planet with wire frame graphics (this was long before the filled in polygons of the VGA rennaissence), shooting space pirates and solving cyphers. It seemed so deep at the time. give it to me now, I'd finish it in an afternoon.

I played "Samantha Foxx Strip Poker" in 1991, when I was in Norway. I was eleven then. Samantha was redered in 8 bit map, starting out dressed in a heavy coat, with a hat, and sunglasses, and you played five card stud to get her nekkid. The game was unrated. In 1991, they didn't rate toys like video games. games like "Samantha Foxx Strip Poker" slowly filtered into the awareness of governors, and a rating and classification system was set up. The average age of computer users was probably below 20ish.

I have the internet now. If I do a google video search for "Strip Poker" i end us with more mind blowing stuff than was ever rendered in 2 bit, or even could be. I dare say the average 11 year old today can run such a search, can probably work out his parents password to unblock the family filter as well. Shit, i daresay any kid could find shit that would make ME blush, and I've frelling DONE that shit.

The attorney general of SA thinks we don't need an R18+ classification for video games. I say we've always needed one, but it is only now with the latest crop of games that the need has become unignorable. Cr Atkinson should snap out of it. It isn't 1988 anymore.