Thirty years ago today, Sony released the first commercially available Compact Disc player, the CDP-101. It launched alongside 50 CDs in Japan, marking the commercial birth of the widely popular digital audio medium.
Over at TechHive (a new site run by the folks behind PC World), I’ve written an in-depth piece that details the history and impact of the CD as a medium for both audio and computer data. I hope you enjoy it.
Guns don’t kill people. My grimy hands do.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever fired a gun in real life? Do any video games successfully replicate that experience?
A stunningly realistic RCA Studio II gameplay session.
Here’s the box cover of TV Arcade III: Tennis/Squash for the for the RCA Studio II (1977), the world’s second ROM cartridge-based video game console.
The early console, which featured only two numeric keypads for control, was such a dog that I named it the “worst video game console of all time” in a 2009 PC World slideshow. Three years later, I stand by that assessment.
You may be asking yourself why RCA prefaced the game title with “TV Arcade III.” Well, silly, that’s because it was part of a sequence of “TV Arcade” games for the RCA Studio II that started with “I” and ended with “IV.” That’s exactly, I might add, how the ancient Romans would have labeled their video games.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever played an RCA Studio II? What did you think?
“You won’t find a bluer word processor package anywhere…”
Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first word processor software you ever used?
Quite frankly, Mario is stunned — just stunned — by that potted plant.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Tell us about your most novel experience with Mario Paint. Did you make any music or animations?
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.
Richard writes:
My father’s birthday is fast approaching, and I want to find him one of his classic games from the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, the name has been lost in time and his fuzzy memory, though the details of it remain. He often remarks about the amazing depth given to characters in the game.
The plot was a mystery of some sort, set in various Bulletin Board Systems. Some clues would be several messages back in the board, and various NPCs would post messages to the board at key points in the story. When connecting to a board, it would slide in from right to left, and then wobble slightly as it stabilized. Apparently the game itself was very well built, apparently having rather good word recognition, allowing for normal-ish conversations.
Beyond that, I know very little about the game. Hopefully the you can help me out, I’d really like to see this game for myself, and I’m sure it would bring him a great deal of joy. Hopefully what I have will be enough.
Thanks for any help,
Richard
It’s up to you to find the object of Richard’s fuzzy memory. Post any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below. Richard 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.
The Chessmaster (1916-1997)
This iconic wizened head loomed large over my childhood. It is the image of the Chessmaster, a fictional chess opponent who stars in a software series of the same name.
That series began way back in 1986 with The Chessmaster 2000, a comprehensive chess simulator that first appeared on 8-bit computer platforms like the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64. Published by The Software Toolworks, it spawned a series of at least 16 titles that quickly became the best-selling chess software franchise of all time.
My older brother always loved chess games, so I saw that aged face — a perennial feature of Chessmaster box art — many times throughout the 1980s and 1990s. I always wondered: who was the Chessmaster, really? Who was the real man behind that wise old face? Was he really that old or was he just wearing a wig?
Fast forward to 2006. Thinking I’d write about it on this blog, I emailed Ubisoft (the current publisher of The Chessmaster series) and asked them if they knew who portrayed the Chessmaster. Of course, they had no idea — institutional memory is sorely lacking in most tech companies, and it’s even worse in the software industry. Today I know better than to even bother asking.
Instead of tracking down everyone who worked on Chessmaster 2000 and interrogating them (although I considered it), I figured I’d bide my time and put the somewhat trivial issue on the back burner. The Internet has a way of consuming information and making it available to everyone online, so I thought the answer would pop up one day.
It did.
Every instance of those 16 TRS-80 logos is trademarked, so hands off!
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you owned a TRS-80 Color Computer (any model)? Tell us about it.
Expert Apple IIc repair by Ulaf Silchov (November 2007)
World Series Baseball 98 for the Sega Saturn
I’ve written about gratuitous and graphic video game advertising of the 1990s more than a few times over the years, but I never get tired of revisiting this wildly bombastic era in consumer marketing.
Here we see a nice ad for World Series Baseball 98 for the Sega Saturn, complete with front-and-center forearm scrape. I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to play baseball. Injury sells.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Would a graphic ad like this make you more or less likely to play a certain video game?
