I got my first VIC-20 in 1982, I think it was in September. I got it as part of a Pepsi bottle cap contest -- where you'd collect the rubber piece underneath the bottle cap. You needed to spell VIC20.
The letters V, I, 2 and 0 were the easiest to get. The "C" (shaped like the Commodore logo) was the hardest one to find. My grandmother owned a convenience store at the time, and my dad asked her to keep the bottle caps that were collected in the bottle opener tray.
Lo and behold, after going through thousands of bottle caps I found the "C" ! What a thrill it was to win my very first computer. A few days later, after coming home from school, my Dad had picked up a VIC-20 along with Jupiter Lander.
After I got bored with playing Jupiter Lander over and over again, I looked inside the owner's manual and found out I could write my own programs. Unfortunately, having no way to store my programs (no tape drive), I found myself writing just very simple games and typing, and retyping KILLER COMET and ROCKET COMMAND over and over again.
The first game I ever bought for was Serpentine ($60! Saved up my birthday and allowance money. I'll hold onto it forever). I had asked for Omega Race for Christmas that year (after playing it in the arcade), but when my Mom asked at the computer store to buy it, the idiot clerk said that it wasn't a very good game for kids and suggested Gorf instead. Yeah, Gorf is fairly good in it's own right. But I did eventually get Omega Race the following year on my birthday.
The other games I would eventually acquire were: Cosmic Cruncher, Cosmic Jailbreak, Sargon II Chess and Cannon Ball Blitz.
My original VIC-20 eventually died, and I would get my first Commodore 64 in 1989. But, in 1990 I would get my second VIC-20 and rediscovered the awesome experience of the original "friendly computer", this time using my C64's disk drive with it.
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