Adam, Christy, Whitney

Finally, a review of Brave New World’s Valentine’s Day Ge3k Singles Night.  I convinced a couple of friends to attend with me.  Adam’s a Comic-Con attending, graphic novel writing, certified geek.  Whereas Whitney, not so much.

Please note Therese's "Jail Bait" sticker. Married people and underaged individuals were clearly defined.

We arrived at Brave New World to be greeted by my friends Therese and Michael.  We  met on the Browncoat Cruise, so our friendship has been rooted in the geeky.   Therese gave us the grand tour of Brave New World and introduced us to Portlyn and Atom, who as the owners of Brave New World, are responsible for bringing geeks together.  All sorts of geeks in all sorts of age ranges were present.  I even ran into Autumn’s co-worker Josh.  I have to admit, I was impressed by the turnout, impressed by the atmosphere, and impressed by energy of the event.  And I learned that Brave New World puts on an event about every 6 weeks, with most of them being Ge3K Single’s Nights.

Portlyn. This Geek Girl runs a great comic book store.

The next event for Brave New World is Free Comic Day in May.  Portland promised to do some pre-screening before that event to help me achieve my life long goal of kissing a cute Stormtrooper.

Whitney and Adam forgot to tell me to wear Converse.

Bands played, geeks mingled.  It was a good night.  Up until we went to see a midnight showing of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.  Just ask Adam.  He hasn’t stopped talking about how it was the worst movie ever.

It's true. Love and Falcon are in the air.

If you were playing adventure games in the 80s, you’ve likely seen some of David Fox’s handiwork. Most programmers back then went uncredited, and household names were still a rarity, but the products he put time into spoke volumes. David worked on many of LucasArts’ early smash hits: “Rescue on Fractalus,” “Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders,” “Maniac Mansion” and others.

Geek6 was able to take up some of David’s time to get his thoughts on the past and future of gaming, as well as the changes that have taken place in the industry over 30 years.

You were in on the computer revolution from the get-go. What was the first home machine you owned?

That’s a tough one…. Since Annie (my wife) and I started the Marin Computer Center in 1977, I guess we ‘owned’ a bunch of computers, though we didn’t have one at home for a few more years (no need, since we were always at the Center).

I guess it would have be a Processor Technology Sol 20, since those were our first computers at the Center. Later we added Apple IIs, Atari 400 & 800s, a Commodore Pet and TRS-80.

How did you get involved with LucasArts?

The second book I wrote was Computer Animation Primer (co-authored with Mitch Waite). My part of the book had a series of tutorials on the Atari 800, but I also wanted to show what the state of the art was at the time (1981). I spent some time with the fledgling Lucasfilm Computer Division.

That was great! They gave me several photos to use in the book, and Alvy Ray Smith (one of the founders of the Computer Division and its Director of Computer Graphics Research) even offered to read our sections on high-end computer animation for accuracy. I also spent some time with Loren Carpenter, one of their programmers, who first animated fractal landscapes in Vol Libre, and then at Lucasfilm with the terraforming scene of the Genesis Planet in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”

A year later, I heard from one of our regular Computer Center visitors (who also happened to work at ILM), that Lucasfilm was starting a new games group. I called Ed Catmul, head of the Computer Division, and got an interview set up.

I was the first person Peter Langston, head of the new games group, hired, and I got to share an office with Loren Carpenter! Out of that office sharing arrangement came the first game I worked on, “Rescue on Fractalus.” I’m still amazed out how serendipitous it all was.

The LucasArts Games Division in 1984. L-R, Charlie Kellner, David Levine (seated), Peter Langston, David Fox, Loren Carpenter, Gary Winnick. (Image courtesy Starwars.com)

What was it like working for LucasArts in the early days?

It was great! Being a part of the Computer Division at first meant we had a very research oriented focus. Our first two games were intended as “throw away” experiments. Only if we thought they were good would we show them to Atari. A few years later, we became much more of a production-focused organization, but we never lost that “research” heritage while I was there.

You actually worked at the Skywalker Ranch, right?

Yes, we were there for 4 years, from 1985 to 1989. We started there with 15 people, and gradually grew to about 65, outgrowing the space.

I loved working there! Amazing scenery, a fireplace right outside my office in the common area, a brook running by outside my office window, amazing meals. On the other hand, when I was crunching on a game, it was hard to enjoy the environment — I probably could have been in a closet and wouldn’t have noticed.

David in Zak McKracken gear, complete with nose glasses. Those of you who played the game are enjoying a good chuckle.

Making games in the 80s was a hugely different affair than it is today. What were the big differences?

Teams were much smaller, and development cycles quite a bit shorter. For example, Zak McKracken took 9 months from concept to completion, with 2 full-time SCUMM scriptors (Matthew Kane and myself), part time support from Ron Gilbert on the SCUMM engine, two artists, plus a team of playtesters.

Many of us did double-duty, taking on roles that might now be shared by multiple people. For example, Matthew also composed all the music, and I also was the project leader/designer. So basically a team of 5-8 people.

Did that make it harder or easier?

I liked having a small team, and having everyone jump in to do whatever it took to complete the game. On the other hand, that also meant I had to do things I really disliked (like scheduling, budgeting, etc.).

I also think that with Facebook games and mobile games, the teams tend to be a lot smaller again, very much like it was in the 80s.

Who do you think had it right, in terms of game development throughout the 80s? Were there any companies that hit it out of the park?

Of course, I’m prejudiced, but I think we did!

The front page of "The National Inquisitor," the clue-laden tabloid that shipped with Zak.

One of our favorite tidbits of early gaming was the schwag that accompanied the software. Zak came with a clue-laden tabloid newspaper, among other things. How did that come about?

It served several purposes… to enrich the gaming experience, provide all those clues so you could more easily make it through the game, and to make it less attractive to pirate the game (since it wouldn’t be as easy to duplicate the newspaper).

Speaking of piracy… Zak’s copy protection was a sheet of codes printed in black ink on dark brown paper that was famously hard to read. I’ve got at least 20 years in optometry bills to forward your way. Was piracy a big problem, even in pre-bittorrent days?

Hah! Sorry about those bills… Yes, absolutely. Even though we didn’t yet have pirate Web sites, we had pirate bulletin board systems. Soon after a game was released, someone would crack whatever copy protection was included and upload the game. They were also traded within some user groups and passed among friends. Unfortunately, I feel we were inconveniencing the honest purchasers of the game by forcing them to enter secret codes while the crackers were able to play through without dealing with them.

We also had a very bad first experience with piracy. A week after we gave beta copies of “Rescue on Fractalus!” and “Ballblazer” to Atari’s marketing department for review, both games were being distributed on those pirate BBSes.

We never found out who did it, and we were naive enough to release those disks without any unique identifying features or copy protection. So by the time the games were actually released, they were already old news, having been played by thousands of people. To this day, people refer to the games by their beta names (Behind Jaggi Lines or Rescue Mission, and Ballblaster).

There were many versions of Zak released for different systems, and all felt a little different — which one, in your mind, is the REAL experience?

The real one is the original, of course! Commodore 64 version.

A comparison of the original C64 version and the enhanced FM-TOWNS version. (Click to enlarge)

A-ha! I knew I chose wisely!

Actually, all of the versions were essentially the same except for graphics and better sound and music. Interestingly, even with the better graphics, we really didn’t add any additional animation, or change the cutscenes. So, the basic experience of playing the game should be the same. I’d recommend the FM-Towns version, which had 256 color images. Check out zak-site.com for some great comparisons of the versions.

Toward the end of your time with LucasArts, you worked on a project called Mirage… what was that about? Why didn’t it take off?

From the time I first started working at Lucasfilm, I really wanted to be doing Location Based Entertainment — essentially interactive Disneyland-type experiences. I was told to hang on, we’d get to it eventually. So in 1990, that time had finally arrived and we created a new, small division called Rebel Arts and Technology.

From David: "The Mirage pod was pretty large, maybe 12' high and 12' in diameter. For scale, notice the full size walk through door on the right with the ramp below it. The large protrusion over the door with the yellow top is the housing for one of the 3 projectors. The screens would be on the far left side."

It wasn’t really part of LucasArts. We partnered with Hughes Simulation to create an immersive multiplayer gaming simulator. RAT was responsible for the creative — game design, sound and music, and the design of the actual 2-person pods — and Hughes would build the imaging system and write the software.

We ended up with an amazing prototype and a kick-ass game, essentially “Rescue on Fractalus!” meets “Star Wars.” You would fly your X-wing (or TIE fighter) through narrow canyons, fight each other, and take on various missions.

It never made it to the public because of the cost of the final systems in the early 90s.

Editor’s note: There’s also Virtual World Entertainment, who made the immersive Tesla Pods for Battletech that I’ve enthused about before.

David in 2005. Wearing the same, decades-old sweatshirt from above.

Do you still play any games today, or have you sworn off of them?

Occasionally I play. Part of the issue for me is I know if I find a great game, my productivity will be shot — I can be compulsive about finishing games and have been known to pull all-nighters. So mostly I stay away from them.

The last one I loved playing was Portal. I tended to get motion sick while playing so I didn’t finish!

Gaming has evolved a lot in the 30 years it’s been around. Have those changes been for the better or worse? If you could take a hatchet and remove one major aspect of today’s gaming experience, what would it be?

All flash and no substance. Not to say that all games are like that, but I think too many resort to better and flashier graphics rather than focusing on great story and gameplay. I just watched “Inglourious Basterds” on DVD and was blown away by its freshness. So given that the film industry is far older than the game industry, I’m truly optimistic that there will always be room for brilliance in games, just as there is in films.

Thirty years is still very young for an entertainment medium, and I know there’s a lot to look forward to.

What have you been up to since your days as a game designer?

David, his wife, Annie and their dog, Josie in the hills of Marin County.

I’ve been working on NewsTrust.net for the past 5 years. It’s a social media site where we rate news stories based on their journalistic quality. Very cool non-profit project. I support my wife, Annie, in her work with kids, parents and educators (Web site, podcats, etc. at http://www.AnnieFox.com).

I’ve also gotten to do some game designs for Disney theme parks, so I’m not totally out of the game industry. And who knows what I might get to work on tomorrow!

We couldn’t play games on Mike’s TI-99 computer that day in 1986. I can’t remember exactly why, but as a result, we wound up in his room, listless and looking for a less technological way to pass the afternoon.

Two hours later, I raced my dirt bike home over suburban asphalt, breathless with excitement. “Mom… mom…” I panted when I got inside. “I played the coolest thing! You could be an elf, or a warrior, and you got to get treasure and kill skeletons.”

“Mmmm,” my mom said, thumbing through a catalogue. “Was it a video game?”

“No, we just had graph paper and dice and stuff. It was called Dungeons and Dragons.”

“…Mmmm,” my mom said, again, turning a page. Now, an un-attuned sort may have heard both of those responses with identical inflection, but I knew mom well enough to parse a distinctly negative connotation from that ellipsis. Something that was going to be discussed later, but only after she could be sure both her and my father were on the same page.

My extra-sensory prescience was correct. After dinner that night, they called me in to the living room.

“So,” dad began. “Tell me about this ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ thing.” His quote marks dripped with suspicion.

I knew better than to approach it with enthusiasm. I set the dial to nonchalant. “It was kinda fun,” I said, watching carefully for a reaction as I described the dice, graph paper and narration. I let my excitement get the better of me, though, as I described things the way my imagination saw them: The vivid and dank dungeon, my brave protagonist stoically slaughtering the demons who stood between me and the gold which lay somewhere within the stone walls. And how it was like a computer game, but cooler, because you could do whatever you wanted, and not just follow the rules, like in a video game. I ended on a manic note, the deafening silence making my gut twinge.

“Josh,” dad began slowly. “That game is dangerous. There were some kids that were playing it and wound up dead in the steam tunnels. It forces you to act out killing people, and no good will come of that. No more of this game, understand?”

My heart pounded. How could I just blot this new-found form of creativity out of my life? There must be some kind of compromise here, I thought, but I was ill-equipped to prepare a counterargument. This merited sleep and the formulation of a plan.

I began my defense slowly at breakfast the next morning, preparing a hail mary as best I could. “You know that game we were talking about yesterday?” I asked. Both my parents looked up in unison, but I continued — I was committed now. “And how it was wrong to kill people? Well… I was thinking about that. … What about if I made my OWN game?” I started to speak faster, for fear that they would cut me off before I got to the point. “But it would only have robots in it. Because, robots could shoot other robots, and it’d just be like a cartoon — they’re not even alive.”

My parents looked at each other. I have to imagine that they had no idea what to do with my request, and were both wondering why I wouldn’t just be content with a football, but the sheer oddity of it must have caught them off guard.

“I guess that’s fine,” my dad said. “Just no killing in your game.”

And there it was. After playing 1 hour of Dungeons and Dragons DM’d by a fellow 10-year-old, I had just been given a license for my own franchise. I was energized. I was going to be able to scratch the itch that had been boiling in my imagination for two whole days. I started moving.

… I seemed to remember needing dice. On my tiptoes, I raided Monopoly, Backgammon and the cubic mother lode of dice, Yahtzee.

… I needed to make a character system. As most of that hour I spent in Mike’s room was on character creation, I knew this had to be pretty important. Strength and Intelligence were must-haves. I plucked Endurance, Agility and Speed from an amalgam of computer games I’d played.

… Of course, since the system had the built-in prerequisite of being based on robots, by golly, I was going to have them transform into otherworldly vehicles and objects.

… I also needed weapons. I tore a sheet of notepaper out and began sketching out a few good, futuristic guns.

… And, of course, a name. Keep in mind, my only exposure to role playing games was an hour of Dungeons and Dragons, so I assumed that alliteration and compound statements were a prerequisite. After a lot of scratched out thoughts on my notebook, Robots and Rebels was born.

Now, I just needed players.

For some reason, I didn’t go to Mike first. Maybe I was still afraid of being burned when my parents discovered my thinly disguised copyright infringement. Maybe I was a little self-conscious of my home-brewed system.

So I went to another circle, and enlisted the help of two friends to help me play-test the game. The scenario was perfect — a sleepover at one of their houses, and we had the whole basement to ourselves.

Robots and Rebels gets a second edition:

Two weeks later, Mike ambushed me in the hall. “I hear you’ve started your own game,” he said, his voice a mix of flat and accusatory.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to play the high road. “Want to see it?” I pulled out the sheaf of worn paper that passed for rules and notes. He thumbed through it, pausing here and there. “Looks pretty good. Mind if I take it home tonight?”

I now had an editor, and a powerfully strong font of knowledge.

A few of Mike's additions.

Mike brought it back before first period the next day, eyes bleary. “It’s really good,” he said. “But it was pretty simple. I made some changes last night that I think you’ll like.” He handed it over and clomped off.

I read through it throughout my classes all day, absorbed in the modifications, yet attentiveness to the source material. He’d taken my little system and really given it an upgrade. It still used my core mechanics, but he added things I’d never thought of, like random hit tables, secondary classes, and a huge boost to the amount of inventory available for purchase.

And, littered throughout, there were mentions to something about a stock market.

Living in a persistent game world.

I showed up the next morning, and there was a tightly-folded note shoved into the vent of my locker. “It was a good day on the stock market,” it read, followed by about 30 vaguely futuristic-sounding companies and their trading rates.

The clever guy had created an entire financial system. Players could start their own companies — usually mercenary outfits or traders — that would be listed. And, every morning, about 10 minutes before class, Mike would be in the library, rolling dice to see how the companies were faring financially. Players could buy or sell stock in their companies or others.

We were going to have to gather more than once a month to play.

The Introductory Page to Robots and Rebels. It's funny — I use almost the same language today when describing RPGs to novices.

Broadening the appeal.

Thank goodness for sweet old ladies who teach first period. My homeroom teacher was a cherubic little lady named Mrs. Pixley. She showed up to class early, and her door was always open. Me and my 6 friends would gather in the back of the room 20 minutes before class, and would roll our little Monopoly dice on the desk, and precede to take down villains with dreams of empire.

We’d get so into it that we’d be playing seconds before the first bell rang. Curious, other students would gather around. A couple of the resident “bad boys” were intrigued by the talk of guns, tanks and mayhem, and approached us and wanted to know what it was all about.

“Cool,” they agreed in committee. “We’ll play.” One person, a particularly angry sort with spiky, bleached hair blurted out, “but the robot thing is retarded. Can’t I just be a guy?”

And, later that morning, the world of Robots and Rebels committed its first act of human violence.

Mom and dad never found out.

Doug's character sheet was filled with doodles — just like any sheet should be.

All told, the game amassed a total of 18 players out of my 30-person English class. Mrs. Pixley had no idea what it was all about, but as I view it through her eyes, I can see why she thought it was so amazing: This shy, bookish kid had was knitting together the surgically stratified caste system of 6th grade together in a way she’d probably never seen.

“Josh,” she’d later write in my 6th grade yearbook. “Can I see you in a few years for some early retirement money?”

I loved every moment of running the game. I was (and still am) a bit of an introvert by nature, which shocks my friends. Being a fledgeling GM allowed me to be at the center of attention and practice wit, charm and acting. And, since it was all part of the game, I did it without any feeling of embarrassment.

The cuthroat world of capitalism.

My system had been around a few months. The initial launch fervor had died down, but I still had an unwieldy group of a dozen players who met before and after school.

But there was competition afoot. One day, a player didn’t show up. “Where were you?” I asked.

“Well,” he began, studying his Reeboks. “There’s a new game — we’re playing a Transformers role-playing game in the cafeteria before school, and it’s a lot of fun.”

My eyes narrowed and my pulse quickened. That’s brand-name appeal, right there, I thought. All of a sudden, Robots and Rebels looked like a K-Mart knockoff version of the real thing. Or, even worse: My game was Go-Bots.

By the time I lost both Amir and Dave to this Transformers game, something had to be done. I went to work hardcore over spring break. I added dozens of planets, entire galactic civilizations, and rules for creating starships and weapons big enough to destroy planets. I created multiple races, from the mantis-like Rontac to the powerless-yet-indestructable Superfluons (I had an obnoxious vocabulary).

Some of the expanded, advanced rules.

And, if those bastards wanted Transformers, I reasoned, here comes the headshot: I wrote up a series of rules which governed the ability to combine your robot with other players to create giant, gestalt machines capable of incalculable power, as long as you functioned as a team.

The new rules and universe were a hit. Amir and Dave both came back. And I never did hear what happened to that Transformers game… save for the fact that one of the former gamerunners rolled up a Robots and Rebels character later that year.

Taking it too far.

By this point, Robots and Rebels had been around for a year, and it was still going strong. In my quest to hook as many people as possible, I took the game to theater rehearsals.

Enough cast members loved the game that I took it to the cast party, which was a remarkably grown up affair held outside of school in the basement meeting room of a bank.

“You brought it?” a friend asked when he saw me show up with a box under my arm. The box was my pride and joy — I’d taken my dad’s empty box Print Shop came in and coated it with thick, white paper. I elaborately illustrated the cover, even putting a $20 price tag on it. It made the game look almost store-bought, and the rattling dice inside gave me a feel of legitimacy.

The music was pounding when we went into the basement. It was a small, dark room — an effect that was largely lost on most of us still-prepubescent 7th grade boys. The girls, segregated on the other side of the room, might have been a little ahead of us.

The evidence remains, more than 20 years later.

As a half dozen of us squatted in the corner, a rogue, punctured can of coke rolled haphazardly in our direction. I heard a girl shout, “Oh, no! My soda!” But all I heard was the slow-motion rolling aluminum can and the hiss of escaping liquid as it moved at us like a tear gas grenade.

My lavishly-illustrated box and several pages were coated in soggy amalgams of corn syrup and caramel. I rushed it to higher ground for emergency drying, but, left without the crutch of gaming, I didn’t know what else to do.

I stood in the corner with a few friends until I was sought out by Jennifer — she played the Unicorn — and she looked into my eyes. “Come dance with me,” she said, her voice firm and entirely non-negotiable. “I don’t dance,” I attempted to stammer, even as I was being pulled out into the center of the dark room.

Every moment of that 7th grade dance is burned into my brain. Her eyes never left mine, and I tried to reciprocate, but there were too many signals going on for my eyes to completely comply.

“Isn’t this better than your game?” she asked, her curly bits of bangs bouncing as she blinked. I nodded, and tried to smile in as much of a debonair-and-unafraid way as I could muster.

She was almost right.

Epilogue.

I moved away half a year later, leaving behind my state, my dozen-plus players, my empire, and the geeky-yet-amalgamated strata of people who were brought together over this game. The universe of Robots and Rebels officially ceased to exist, its combined written history stuffed into a large, red binder.

Skaters, jocks, dancers, nerds… we were like a 7th grade Breakfast Club. Except, instead of coming together over detention, we bonded over the shared experience of creating a world together. Something that was far more alive and rich than something I could have done on my own.

At the height of Robots and Rebels’ popularity, I took some advice from a great uncle. He was savvy when it came to the world, as the piles of heavy gold jewelry and bracelets he wore would certainly confirm. “Mail it to yourself,” he winked at me one summer. “Nobody can ever steal it if you put it all in an envelope and sent it TO yourself, FROM yourself.”

Years later, when my parents were cleaning the attic, that thick manila envelope of legitimacy was tossed out with old homework, book reports and filled up algebra notebooks. I assumed that any real proof of my 6th grade feat would be lost to the sands of time.

Until last year, when I was going through a box my parents had sent me. As I leafed through old newspaper clippings, I came across a familiar red binder. Hopeful, I cracked it open and was hit with that sweet thump of treasured nostalgia. I almost wept, sitting out in the cold garage, thumbing through original pages of my past that told volumes about the type of person I would grow up to be.

The coming soon section. I sincerely hope nobody's been waiting 20 years for the "upcoming sourcebook."

I touched the perforated edges of the computer paper, felt the rough texture of the pencil sketches and gingerly flipped through the brittle, mismatched drawings. I recalled the early mornings, late nights and lazy Sundays full of dreaming up that universe. When I looked at the maps, I didn’t see the dot-matrix characters I’d printed out, but those worlds from eye level, and the adventures good friends had within them.

Thanks to my parents’ uninformed resistance, I was able to embark on more than a year’s worth of imagination that taught me independence, teamwork, planning, and yes, even social skills.

And to this day, I’ve still never played Dungeons and Dragons.

He laughed for about five minutes then said “Of course!”  He presented it to me at my wedding.  It’s Hothian tradition, after all.

Malaki told me he had to present my present, I have an inkling as to what it is, notice my ridiculous nerd grin.

we discuss popular Tauntaun feeding grounds

the fanboys are impressed

the children are awed

the exact moment my niece realizes she's cooler than me

photos by Christina Domingues

In the winter of 1982, my dad and I trekked across the crunchy Michigan snow to our neighbor’s house to see his new toy.

“It’s called a Commodore 64,” he said. “And it’s changed my life.” Over the next few minutes, he demoed a word processor, swapped the discs to show us a database program and, finally, an adventure game.

He waggled the joystick around a little, and the little sprite dutifully complied. I don’t know what game it was that he showed us, but I can remember exactly what it looked like.

My jaw dropped.

And, because dad was a particularly good shoe salesman, we had one less than a month later. I can remember driving all over town to get the pieces, like some crazy scavenger hunt — we picked up the two-tone beige beast from one store, drove for 10 minutes to pick up the printer and a custom soldered cable, and to a final store for the monitor and some software: Dbase64, Easyscript and a little racing game called LeMans. My 7-year-old brain remembers that dad spent thousands of dollars on that state of the art setup, in hopes it would make him a better salesman.

Dad worked out of a home office in the basement — a brown-paneled affair with a homicide-grade metal desk, which now sported this 5-piece technological monument to earth tones. The room smelled strongly of laundry detergent and cigarette ash — not the smell of someone idly smoking, but the ground-in, peppery, nasal-invading heft of an annual 3 months’ worth of off-season nervous smoking. To this day, I can’t smell cigarette smoke without thinking of that home office.

I read this issue. Many times.

Our neighbor moved a couple months later, and willed me his big stack of “Compute’s Gazette” computer magazines. I read each one literally dozens of times, pored over the screen shots, and slowly pecked my way through the programs in the back of each magazine.

I would rush home after school and spend days at a time tapping out the BASIC programs on those pages to create simple programs. One program even created “digitized sound” using the Datasette tape deck — the effect was achieved by rapidly toggling the internal volume control off and on, and you could capture a breathtaking 11-seconds of whisper-quiet digitized audio before the active RAM filled up.

I got pretty good with Commodore BASIC. Good enough to program dozens of games of my own creation — well, to start programming them, anyway, before I moved on to the next big idea. For a couple of years, too, I’d delight in making babysitters nervous by creating fake programs that made it look like I’d hacked into some corporate mainframe somewhere. At the height of “Wargames” and “Tron” paranoia, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

The Last V-8 was like driving a leaky pinto. Hit a dust bunny and your car would burst into flames. Again.

And the games. Oh, the games. Airborne Ranger, Wasteland, Echelon, Questron, Elite, the Bard’s Tale… the names still roll through my head accompanied not by the graphics, but by the scenes my imagination devised to fill in the gaps around blocks of text and occasional 16-color graphics. The stories that those characters embarked on during the minute-plus load times rival anything coming out of game studios today. When my collection got tired, I’d pedal down to the strip mall and spend an hour staring at every box, before I finally forked over my $7.99 in sweaty bills for the latest budget title from Mastertronic.

Smoked plastic. I miss the 80s.

The printer was a 9-pin dot-matrix Epson, capable of printing custom images, which I would later pen on a shaky touch-tablet plugged into the joystick port. The paper came in those giant stacks of perforated goodness, and I delighted in peeling off the track-fed edges. I ended up taking that same printer to college, where it would faithfully grind out pages of reports hastily finished at 3 a.m.

As I got into junior high school and discovered primitive videography, my C64 doubled as the world’s cheapest video editor. I would connect alligator clips to the audio and video ports, and use it to create title sequences and simple sound transition tracks. I remember doing a 5 minute adventure movie consisting of limited live action, and “special effects” sequences which were, in truth, recorded scenes from the “Test Drive” game, set to my “Top Gun” soundtrack.

Same computer, less beige.

And, when the heart of the beige beast died more than 7 years later, I remember driving to the local Toys R’ Us with mom to get a replacement Commodore 64. This new one was whiter, slimmer… and retailed for $199. At a toy store. A far cry from the thousands of dollars in high-tech hardware spent back in 1982.

The machine grew with me as I did. I graduated from BASIC to machine language. I added a software speech synthesizer and a primitive MIDI setup for computer music. It was my toy as a kid, my escape during cruel junior high years, and my creative outlet well into high school. I never once thought it lacked style or class… until I graduated in 1993 and got a brand new computer: A custom 386-16 with a VGA monitor. It’s 256 colors and potential for a 16-voice sound card (if I saved enough that summer), made my pokey Commodore seem positively neanderthal.

But I still didn’t have the heart to throw it away. The machine followed me into adulthood, and continued to follow me around the nation, albeit in rarely unpacked boxes. Its final night with me was in the summer of 2003, more than 20 years after I’d first set eyes on it. The computer had been a part of my home longer than my children, spouse, even parents.

“It’s time,” my wife said, noting the upcoming community garage sale, and correctly pointing that it hadn’t been plugged in for years. “It’s just sitting in the attic. I know you love it, but maybe it’s time to quit dragging it around the country.”

I pulled down the shoe boxes containing thick spiral-bound owner’s manuals, their weight and density something from a different era. I opened the plastic disk boxes, thumbing through my hand-drawn game labels from my brief time in the primitive hacking scene. Bits of paper fell out, corners of notepads scribbled with game codes, notes from adventures, doodles done during level loads.

And the hardware. The two-tone brown 1541 disk drive (if I ran my hand over the vents in the back just right, it would make a whistling sound), Sakata monitor and computer itself. I hauled them all down from the attic and packaged them up. I created a sign on my noisy-yet-zippy Windows computer. “Commodore 64 — collector’s item loved by owner! Dozens of games, all in working order! $100.”

After more than 20 years, that handful of words didn’t do it justice.

The day of the garage sale, I set up the machine, arrayed the manuals out, displayed a handful of the disks. People came and went, not batting an eye. I dropped the price to $50. Not a nibble, or so much as a glance. One 8-year-old stopped to touch the Quickshot joystick, but his mother kept dragging him on. I watched people troll by with used bicycles, worn clothing, tattered couches. But no takers for this cornerstone of my life.

Not even for $20.

At the end of the day, my heart sunk. I knew that I couldn’t take it back to the attic. By dragging it out to this parking lot, I’d already taken the first step to separation.

There was a trailer there, like a little modular shed, for donatable items if they didn’t sell. “Maybe a school will get it,” I thought to myself, “maybe it’ll find a good home,” I hoped, with all the lost consolation of someone dropping off a pet at the local pound.

One heavy piece at a time, I set the rounded, beige pieces of my childhood in the back of the trailer. I snuggled the boxes of disks in as close as I could, lest they be piled over with unwanted clothes and busted toys. I made sure the cables were wrapped neatly and tight — if just one got lost, it wouldn’t run. I hoped that, wherever this trailer was going, somebody there would know that the fragile soldered cable dad paid $100 for back in 1982 was an RS-232 cable, and it was needed to hook the computer’s serial port up to a printer too far ahead of its time.

But, as someone dragged a broken lawn mower into the trailer, I knew that wasn’t likely to happen.

I turned to leave, but momentarily paused. I lifted the flap on one of the boxes, and reached in. My hands found one game box — Wasteland, one of my favorites — and pulled it out. I opened the lid, and smelled the faint tinge of cigarette smoke, still there after all these years.

I left the trailer and walked into Midwest maroon sunset, one small memento of my past saved in my fingers.

Geek Girls Network & Geeky Clean have created a fundraiser to support the Haiti Relief called Geeks With Heart.

Through Mercy Corp, Geeks With Heart has a fundraising goal of $2500 and thereís no minimum for donations. If you can spare just one special cup of coffee, an iTunes download, or a crispy chicken sandwich, donate to Haiti instead. Show Haiti why geeks have heart!

As extra incentive, and not that you need any, once Geeks With Heart reaches $2500, all who donated will have the chance to win a prize from an amazing grab bag of geek prizes!

So donate, tweet it up, put a badge on your website, and tell all your friends and family. Thanks!

Geeks With Heart: http://www.mercycorps.org/fundraising/geekgirls

Geeks With Heart Haiti Relief Fund from Galaxy Sailor on Vimeo.

Let's all take a cue from Mr. Rogers and say hello to our neighbors.

I recently stumbled upon a friend of a friend’s blog and read about their social experiment using “leisure cards.”  It’s an interesting and funny read.  You should click on the link to check it out.

The idea is that we tend to broadcast so much of our personal life on the internets via facebook, twitter, and the like and are contrastingly becoming more and more insular in regards to face to face interactions.  I’ve met a few of my neighbors in the 3 months I’ve lived in my new place.

There’s the girl downstairs that introduced herself one evening by knocking on my backdoor.  She had come home after being gone all day to find her backdoor wide open.  She didn’t want to venture in by herself.  We bonded over fear.

And then there’s the puppy people next door.  One night last week they didn’t shut their backdoor all the way and their dogs got out.  I pulled into the drive while being circled by three dogs.   I had to make a few phone call before I herded up the two dogs that actually lived there and shut them back inside, but that was after the lady across the way (I don’t know her name, just that she’s the one that drives with all her windows down blaring old school R&B) told me she saw them down at the liquor store.  They (humans and puppies) left me a card in my mailbox, so I haven’t actually met them.

It’s as if we’re scared to actually meet each other and it seems easier to just go along with our daily lives ignoring the fact that there are three other apartments in the fourplex.  Three sets of lives that are intertwined because of their proximity.  And I’m beginning to question why.  I may make some leisure cards myself.

Growing up, we had a cookie lady on our block. Just knock on her door and she'd give you cookies. One for each hand. We miss you Mrs. O'Neil. I strive to be The Cookie Lady as I age.

Looking for love in Alderaan places?

Like boys who like toys?

Looking for a girl who knows what a D20 is for?

Have we got a party for you!

Live music and liver (huh, how do you spell ‘more live’) singles.

$5 at the door gets you $5 in Brave New Bucks, entrance to the event and entrance into our Raffle Of Love.

Featuring the musical stylings of:

Sarah Johnston (http://myspace.com/sarahjohnston1)
The Oceanographers (http://myspace.com/theoceanographersmusic)
The Wind-Up Toys (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wind-Up-Toys/193437535549?ref=ts)
Modern American Theatre (http://www.myspace.com/modernamericantheatre)

With a reading and signing by the lovely Sarah Kuhn from her geek romance novel One Con Glory (http://www.alertnerdpress.com/books/one-con-glory/)

Plus our usual games and shenanigans.

Check out their Facebook Event.  That way you can scope out some of the geeks that have already RSVP’d.

1.  USB Plasma Heart:  She’ll be able to literally reach out an touch your heart from her desk.  $17 from usb.brando.com

2.  Cthulhu in Love Perfume:  Nothing says love quite like tentacles, even geek girls understand that.  Well at least the sorority girls at Miskatonic University do.  $17.99 from thinkgeek.com

3.  Plush Gun & Grenade:  Forget stuffed animals.  Geek girls would rather have stuffed weapons.  $8.99 – $19.99 from thinkgeek.com

4.  Locked On Proximity Sensing Shirt:  This shirt continuously scans and notifies you when your target is in range.  $19.99 from thinkgeek.com

5.  Mix Tape USB Memory Stick:  The mix tape is a classic, but step up the technology for a geek girl.  $9.99 from amazon.com

6.  Kissing Love Tester:  Hold your geek girl’s hand, kiss her like you’ve never kissed her before and if you’re scientifically compatible the Kissing Love Tester will light up and play music.  Use at your own risk as we all remember how the compatibility drops were the beginning of the end of D’Argo and Chiana’s relationship.

Sexy Secret Book! – Funny blooper videos are here

7.  Sexy Secret Book:  Make your geek girl a secret book with recordable audio.  I know I’d like to store my treasures there.  How-to from metacafe.com

I now think I can add pin toting, mouse ear wearing Disney fanatics into equal comparison with geeks and sports fans.  Not only do Disney fans have a few meccas, they also haven exclusive club.  Yep, I’m talking about Club 33.    Did you know that Club 33 currently has a 14 waiting list and is no longer accepting names?  Basically you’re on the list waiting for an existing member to die.  Seriously!  And that’s with the initiation fee for an individual running $10,450 with yearly fees of $3,275.  All these fees basically give you the right to make a reservation for a meal you will have to pay for.  Granted there are  few perks.  Cool talking chandeliers and bragging right.  Club 33 is also the only place in Disneyland where you can purchase and consume alcohol.  Dinner for 4 without alcohol and tips is about $275.  Okay, I’ll admit that I’m writing this like I don’t understand the appeal.  I do.  I’m a card carrying Annual Passholder and have been for the last 7 years.  I’d love to dine at Club 33, but not if I have to pay the fees.  For those prices I could buy a Michael Turner original art and track down the fool at purchased John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-men’s #8 page 18 before I could, and go on a shopping spree at Comic-Con.

What can I say, I'm a Cyclops girl. Always have been. This is the page where Wolverine says, "Now and then, Summers...I remember why you are in charge."