We’ll be diving into my collection here. It has and will continue to inspire my work!
Few of these games appear in “greatest this or that of all time” lists. I don’t care. For me, this is the golden age of gaming. If you agree, partially or in whole, this is the place for you. Welcome! 🙂
The Apple IIGS
80s gaming didn’t necessarily require an Apple II, or a GS for that matter. There were many other options.
But the Apple IIGS came from a line of personal computers, the IIe especially, that was in every school and a big chunk of the homes equipped with home computing at the time. The IIGS offered phenomenal advances in graphics and sound (GS = Graphics and Sound), computing power and an unequaled software library. It should’ve come out on top, right?
There are two main reasons that I heard of that got the Apple line buried for over a decade.
- Steve Jobs killed it in favor of the Macintosh line?
So… This thing (Apple Macintosh Classic II, 1991-1993, beat… 
the IIGS in Steve Jobs’s mind? Maybe, I guess. - The advent of 3D gaming.
Reason one is unimportant and probably mostly untrue. Jobs was fired by the Apple board in 1985 and the IIgs was launched in 1986. If Jobs tried to favor the Macintosh, he arguably failed, at least in the short run. By the time his company, NeXT Inc, was purchased by Apple (for a quarter billion – with a B- dollars), bringing him back on board, the Apple II line was long gone.
There’s talk of him sabotaging the Apple II line with weaker processing speed but counter rumors suggest that the Apple II processors weren’t able to reliably keep up on a large scale at competitive rates.
Reason two seems a lot more definitive to me. The only hardware that could offer the possibility of mimicking 3D in real time in the early 90s was IBM PC. This allowed Wolfenstein 3D and Doom to redifine gaming in the 90s, and they only worked on PC. FPS was in, charming adventure games and turn-based RPGs were virtually gone. Thus was market demand (sadly). And with them, Apple, Amiga, Tandy, Comodore, etc etc, bit the dust.
Which is why my golden age of gaming remains the 80s. Also I was a kid then but that doesn’t account for anything. Nothing. At. All. 🙂
This doesn’t mean I don’t have a few favorites that came along later, but the Apple IIGS still has a (large) spot in my home office today.
A BB gun!
To think I really wanted a BB gun for Christmas that year. My father nudged me away from a career in crime and wanton destruction and turned me into a geek instead. Well done, Dad!
Humble Beginnings
My software library got off to a rocky start.
I strayed from the path of improved scholastic achievement through a battle of wills and asking my mother instead.
While it took decades, and the magic of eBay to assemble my current collection, it all started that day at Babbage’s , where I acquired my first RPG: Might and Magic – Secret of the Inner Sanctum.