Outsource your sex educations needs to Datachem
“Mommy, where do babies come from?”
“Well, after a wild night of CTRL-ALT-DELETE, your father hit my CTRL-C then pressed CTRL-V, and nine months later, you came out from LPT1.”
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever played any sex-related computer games? (Or heck, even educational software.)
Marvel should turn this into a movie
In 1983, comic book giant Marvel experimented with publishing a video game magazine called Blip. Here is the cover of the premiere issue, which features Little House on the Prairie star Matthew Laborteaux.
Wikipedia says this about Laborteaux, who was apparently a dedicated video game fan:
Laborteaux is a skilled video game player. In October 1981 he finished in tenth place for Centipede at the Atari, Inc. world championships, and in April 1982 became the United States Pac-Man champion at a People-sponsored tournament, with a score of 1,200,000.
Celebrities are people too.
Regarding the magazine itself: Blip retained the size, shape, weight, and thickness of a typical 1980s Marvel comic book. It was even printed on the same type of paper, likely using the same presses Marvel used for its superhero books at the time.
I haven’t thumbed through this magazine in years — it’s currently in storage — but I remember being sadly underwhelmed by its content when I bought this copy off eBay about a decade ago. I recall thinking that the printing technology did not reproduce photos very well, which did not lend itself to splashy, colorful video game ads or screenshots. Perhaps partly because of this, the mag only lasted seven issues.
The Internet Archive currently hosts scans of all seven issues of Blip.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever read any comics (strips or books) based on video games? What are your favorites?
Leeloo Dallas Multiplan
Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first electronic spreadsheet program you ever used?
The Ultimate Helicopter Eclipse Simulator
Discussion Topic of the Week: Other than Civilization, what is the best MicroProse title of the 1980s and 1990s?
Paid for by SwyftCard Veterans for Truth
From the land of exotic Apple II accessories comes the Information Appliance SwyftCard, a plug-in peripheral card that gave the Apple IIe a built-in suite of ROM-based productivity tools, all unified around a novel scroll-based [PDF] user environment called SWYFT.
SWYFT was the brainchild of former Apple employee Jef Raskin, who originally spearheaded the Macintosh project. After disagreements with Steve Jobs over the direction of that project, Raskin left Apple and founded Information Appliance, Inc. (consequently, Jobs took the Mac project in a completely new direction).
The SwyftCard originated as an Apple IIe-based prototype for a dedicated machine centered around Raskin’s SWYFT environment, but it proved so effective and compelling that it became its own product. The dedicated concept would later emerge as the Canon Cat in 1987.
SwyftCards are very rare (I’ve never seen one in person over 20 years of collecting Apple II hardware), so Apple enthusiast Mike Willegal has provided instructions for building your own. Pretty neat!
P.S. I emailed this ad to Steve Wozniak (who is featured in the ad) and he said, “Cool reminder!”
Discussion Topic of the Week: Jef Raskin vs. Steve Jobs: Who do you identify with the most?
Every once and a while, I receive emails from people looking for a certain game, electronic toy, or computer from their distant past. I then pass it on to intrepid VC&G readers to crack the case.
Marko writes:
I need help identifying adventure game for Amstrad CPC. I remember playing the game in the late 80’s (possibly ’88 – ’89, but the game itself could be older). I didn’t play it much though, possibly due to difficulty, but I do remember that I liked “mystery” feeling about the game.
Now for what I remember (and hopefully all this is correct). It is a text based (possibly had list of options / actions to select) and the story revolves around a group of people (possibly family?) being shipwrecked / having an accident at sea due to a storm. The game begins with telling the story about the incident. Now this is the part that I could be wrong about, but I think the player is tasked with either finding the people that were on the ship or finding about their history. Again, it is possible that that group of people is a family and possibly player’s ancestors.
In terms of graphics, game had black background, and I remember a lot of red colour / shades of red being used for drawings. At the beginning of the game, when the story is being told, I remember a picture of the ship which was drawn in red pen / outline.
This is all I can remember, I know its not much, and hopefully most of the facts above are correct – my memory of this game is very very hazy.
If your readers could possibly help with identifying the game in question, I would be really grateful – would love to try it again in an emulator.
Kind regards,
Marko
It’s up to you to find the object of Marko’s fuzzy memory. Post any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below. Marko will be monitoring the comments, so if you need to clarify something with him, ask away. Good luck!
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Have a memory of a computer, video game, computer software, or electronic toy you need help identifying? Send me an email describing your memories in detail. Hopefully, the collective genius of the VC&G readership can help solve your mystery.
Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite static-screen graphical adventure game of all time?
“Web storage needs getting a little out of hand?”
Discussion Topic of the Week: Total up all your personal computer storage you have in use, right now, in gigabytes (local site only, not cloud). How much data storage do you currently use at home?
CD-ROM ON YOUR MOTHER LOVIN’ TV!!
Back in 2009, I made a list of the worst video game systems of all time for PC World, and the Tandy Memorex Video Information System (1992) was #2 on the list.
Six years later, I am not fond of dishing out bad vibes toward any game console. But the VIS was indeed an underwhelming commercial product.
And honestly, calling the VIS a video game console is a stretch. As more of a multimedia appliance than a straight up “video game system,” its lineage lay half-way between game machine and general purpose PC. Its designers intended it to run educational software as frequently as games.
For fans of odd an interesting systems, the VIS definitely stands out. Under the hood, it sported a modified PC architecture based on an Intel 286 CPU and a custom embedded version of Windows called “Modular Windows.” In addition, the VIS allowed storing data on removable memory cards that plugged into the front of the console (a feature that, in game consoles, arrived second only to the Neo Geo, I believe).
Of course, ever since I saw this section of a 1995 Tiger Software catalog (Tiger had apparently bought up a clearance stock of the machines — see also this scan of the Jaguar CD in a Tiger catalog), I wanted a VIS regardless of its faults. While I have used them before — including some in-store demos at Radio Shack — I still do not have one in my collection.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you own any CD-based game consoles from the multimedia console era? (i.e. CD-i, VIS, 3DO, CDTV, Jaguar CD)
My brother Jeremy playing Slime on the Atari 800 in his room, Jan 14 1983
Discussion Topic of the Week: When you were a kid, did your parents let you have a computer in your bedroom?
