What was your first Vic game and what Vic games you had?

Mikam73 · Post by **Mikam73** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 12:13 am

What was your first Vic20 game and what Vic20 games you had on 80s?

My first Vic20 game was: Jupiter Lander

I had:

Jupiter Lander
Gorf
Sargon II Chess

Psycho Shopper + 8k mem ex cart.
Infos Computer club collection tape with:
Amok
Bliz
Ventti
etc

Orcourse we wrote games from computer magazines like: Ski and Katakombi.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 2:45 am

I know my big brother got (or bought?) two tapes with his VIC-20. Unfortunately, both were for expanded VIC so they wouldn't load and he had to exchange them for something else. I can't quite recall which titles they were, but I remember Arcadia and Bewitched among the first games he had, so those may be the ones he exchanged for.

He never owned any cartridge. Once he borrowed a few (broken Road Race, A World at War and a third one .. perhaps a 16K expansion) but it was not until I bought the VIC from him that I got a 12K expansion. I got my first cartridge game in 1994 or so.

Schlowski · Post by **Schlowski** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 5:13 am

I do not remember which games I had - in the old times we ordered some tapes with lots of software for a few bucks as piracy was not recognized as a seriuos crime in that days... So it depends on how you define 'programs I had' - I definately bought no games from their original manufactorers, but I bought quite a lot from other people.

The programs I remember are
Meteoroids & Satellites, some sort of Asteroids clone
Gridrunner
Tron
Bonzo, which was our favorite game over a long, long period with game sessions through the night and trying to get just another hiscore.

Björg

vic user · Post by **vic user** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 5:41 am

i only got my first vic about three years ago.

it did come with cosmic cruncher, and that is what first booted up on it.

chris

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 6:07 am

It took about a half year for Swedish magazines to detect all the piracy going on in the classifieds section, and they put big notes about any attempt to sell or trade pirate copies would be turned in to the law enforcement. They also had articles about the growing problem of piracy, and that was in late 1983, early 1984. Sweden for a few years was known to be so infected that a few software companies refused to sell their games here.

Schlowski · Post by **Schlowski** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 6:36 am

Piracy was a theme in the magazines from '84 on, if I remeber correctly. But I got my VIC 1982, in that time it was even impossible to get some software at all. Computers were sold in business oriented shops for lots of money, especially the PET series. There were some books, some office software but no games at all...

Half a year after I bought it a little computer shop opened in my hometown, that was the beginning of the homecomputer aera here. And I remember that the salesman in that shop talked a lot of b*s* to get people into buying obsolete hard- and software. So I mainly used the shop to look, get some ideas and meet other peaople interested in computers. The only thing I bought there was my first memory expansion - and it was a 64k expansion

Even in that days I wanted more RAM than anybody else

Björg

vic user · Post by **vic user** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 6:46 am

Even in that days I wanted more RAM than anybody else

are you the guy driving the rolls royce on the front cover of May's 1981 compute?

chris

Schlowski · Post by **Schlowski** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 8:07 am

Unfortunately not

That were all my savings, 398 DM which are about 203,50 Euro today. But of course you have to take the inflation into account, so this was really expensive. Otoh I spent 798 DM for my VIC (408 Euro) so the Kb/DM ratio was quite good for the expansion

Björg

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 8:20 am

For a short while, my brother was into selling Mastertronic budget games to friends. He knew an older guy who imported or in other ways got ahold of these games (VIC, C64, Spectrum etc). I think my brother sold a few, and then our mother intervened, forcing him to return the rest.

vic user · Post by **vic user** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 8:26 am

was your borther doing something dodgey, or was it just your mom being strict, or a combo of both?

chris

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 8:40 am

The older guy appeared a bit dodgy, and my brother was about 16 years old or so.

vic user · Post by **vic user** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 8:52 am

darn it.

it sounded neat at first.

chris

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 5:25 pm

Somewhere I have an unused sticker from that guy's computer firm, but I can't find it now. I don't know if the budget brands at first had difficulties getting into the shelves of computer stores, so they may actually have seeked other means of distribution (like Tupperware parties, but game software instead).

Speaking about Mastertronic, I wonder how many of their games were licensed and how many were blatant rip-offs of other companies. Some of their early C64 titles only differed a few pixels here and there from other known games.

Post by **Jeff-20** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 7:20 pm

Gridrunner.

Years later I would get Omega Race and Pacman as birthday gifts from my brother.

MacbthPSW · Post by **MacbthPSW** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 7:41 pm

(Warning, nostalgic ramblings ahead)

I'm pretty sure I didn't get a VIC-20 until the very early '90s. But I certainly have good memories of the VIC-20, and nearly bought one in early '84, but right at the store my parents convinced me to get a C64, and overall that was probably a good call (no offense intended!)

The first VIC-20 I saw was at a trade show probably in late '82 or early '83, and it made a big impression on me. I had played a lot of PET and Atari 2600 games by that time, but the VIC games seemed way more advanced. I still remember the two games I saw were Avenger and Road Race.

The next time I saw the VIC, it was while visiting someone's house for a church picnic or something - probably summer '83. Some of the older boys were playing Omega Race on it. I didn't know the game at the time, so I asked if the oldest guy there had written it - I guess even at that time my mindset was DIY, and didn't really think of going to a store to buy games. He said he had (whether he was outright lying, or just being sarcastic I'm not sure) , but it soon became clear to me that he hadn't half a clue how to code.

While I'm at it, one more early VIC story though it's not about games. Before I nearly bought a VIC, I bought a Timex Sinclair 1000. I couldn't get the thing to save or load from cassette (they didn't have an official tape deck at the time, so you just hooked your own up with regular audio cables, and had to mess around with volume levels etc.). I was 10 or 11 years old at the time, and my parents had no idea how to help, so they sent me with my computer with my aunt to her boyfriend's place. He was a great big gruff guy who scared the crap out of me. He couldn't get it to work either, but he did spend some time showing me all the BASIC programs he was writing on his VIC-20. I couldn't understand most of it at the time, but I still remembered it, and now I can tell they were fairly simple programs that just performed some calculations on some input - like simple text only geometry, calculus, kind of stuff. That experience leads to a whole bunch of other stories that aren't VIC related, so I'm telling my wife them now, and sparing all of you