The C64 theme has to do with my childhood. When I was growing up (from age 5 to… 11?) You would normally find me in the living room, laying stomach down on the blue carpet, Commodore in front of me. We had it hooked up to our big old wooden framed television set. I’d be playing Shamus, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Zork…

Zork provoked my imagination unlike much else in my life has. The colors that are so reminiscent of Commodore 64 computers reminds me of a time that I was immersed in my own mind, creating visual landscapes and characters that I only read about from the screen as I played with my older brother. The choose-your-own-adventure gameplay was perfect. It allowed me to familiarize myself with reading in an exciting and engaging way.

Zork suggests that for a video game to be good, it must capture the player. It must bring them into a virtual world, an alternate plane of concentration where you may dive in head first and actually believe for a minute you are in the game itself. For a text based adventure game, like many will surely agree, Zork did it best.

As is said, ‘those were the days’.

Of course, we didn’t know how to save the game (we loaded from tape) so we would always stay from the beginning, making our way ‘behind house’ and down the staircase, sword, knife and garlic in hand. Sometimes we would explore outside, and one time we found a bug in the version of the game we had. We would type ‘run’. It would ask, ‘what do you want to run?’ To which you would reply, ‘me’.. This would somehow trigger a bug and we would end up in a cave (which we had never gotten to before). Much excitement in early ‘hacking’ as it were.

The C64 will always be special to me, and mostly due to this specific game and the early memories I associate with it.

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