Any Love For the Tandy CoCo?

The first computer game I ever played pre-dates the MS-DOS era. When I was four years old, my parents bought a Tandy Color Computer. When I say "my parents", I mean "my dad", because mom wasn't thrilled with the idea and he had to talk her into it, as it was a significant outlay of money back then. And the first piece of software he showed off was a Space Invaders clone entitled "Space Assault".

I was enthralled. My mom, on the other hand, was having second thoughts about dad bringing an arcade into the house. There wasn't much she could do about "Space Assault", or the other cartridge game he'd purchased ("Castle Guard", which was a "Warlords" knock-off), but they did decide that, at least until my brother and I were older, any new games that came home had to be ones that would help us learn something, even if it was basic problem solving skills or just how to type on the keyboard.

Fast forward a couple of years, and a friend of the family showed us this new computer game he had been playing: Colossal Cave Adventure. Rather than drawing graphics on the screen, it used simple text to create an entire world in your imagination. My brother and I went ga-ga over this new development. A computer game you could read! How incredible!

Mom kindly took us to the local Radio Shack, and when we were describing the game, the clerk said, "I don't think we have a version of that game, but we do have one that's similar." He walked to the shelves, and came back with Zork I: The Great Underground Empire.

Zork was the first game we played as a family, where we'd all put our heads together to try and solve the puzzles, map out the dungeon, and figure out what worked and what didn't. It was a grand example of how much fun you could have combining writing and gaming, and it unlocked a life-long love of Interactive Fiction.

My brother, as far as I'm aware, still has that Color Computer, and that 5 1/4" double-sided floppy disk with Zork I on it. One of the first things I did upon learning of the Retro eXo project was grab eXoDOS and install Zork, just so I could play through it again.

I still had the map mostly memorized. I remembered all the puzzles. I beat the game in about two hours. And I loved every minute of it, just the same as I had 40 years earlier. While it wasn't the first computer game I ever played, I consider it the first game that truly made me a computer gamer, and that, I think, is the more important story.