Once upon a time the world was not filled with computers. Oh there were a few but they hid in the basements of large corporate offices. Once in a while you might see a picture of one on the news, though mostly all you got to see were the tape drives. Well one day along came a revolution in computers. They were smaller and almost affordable to the common man. I was one of those men.
The first computer I ever touched was in the showroom of a Radio Shack store. A friend and I keyed in a simple loop that displayed our names across and down the screen. We giggled with delight. Later I spent hours at the public library writing Commodore PET basic programs. But that was not enough. I wanted my own. I wanted to write games, make money, be famous. So I looked at all the computers there were and one stood out as the best machine to write and play games on, the Atari 800.
In January of 1982 I cashed in a life insurance policy, made out a check for $1,034.00 to a company far far away (Nevada) and in a week had the apple (Atari) of my eye. I got all the tech manuals. I got a program editor and a macro assembler. I got a box of floppies and I was off.
I had enjoyed the movie Tron. From youth I had loved motor cycles so the
light cycles in the movie really appealed to me. In the arcades there was
a Tron game, but the light cycles in it did not play the way I wanted them
to. So here was my chance. A niche that needed to be filled, both in my heart
and in the market place.
I began to write, I studied, trial and error. Pieces coming together and then falling apart. Little by little the program took shape. Basic movement, shapes, colors, sounds and of course explosions. Later I had to give the computer opponent some brains. A radar system to hunt down the human. An algorithm to close in on him and trap him and destroy him.
After hundreds of hours the game seemed ready. Those who played it liked it. So in January of 1984 I put a title screen on it as a last thought and mailed it off to the Atari Program Exchange (APX) (the Atari people who might publish the little user written game). Within a month I had letter back. It read:
February 23, 1984Interesting! Interesting huh! I thought it was a lot more than interesting. As games go it was not glitzy. It looked plain and the title screen was just plain dismal. BUT the game play was good, and isn’t that why you buy a game? Well isn’t it? OK, OK. Even I won’t buy a game today that doesn’t blow my socks off with special effects like those in MechWarrior 2 or the graphic opulence found in Half-Life (my 2 favorites). But Tracer was MY game.Thank you for the opportunity to review your program, TRACER. We found the program interesting; however, it does not fit our marketing needs at this time. We wish you success in placing it elsewhere.
Should you write other programs in the future for the ATARI Home Computer, we hope you will consider submitting them to the ATARI Program Exchange.
Sincerely yours,
Gene Plagge
Software Reviewer
ATARI Program Exchange
So I went on to other things on the Atari, a disassembler (CodeBuster), a
character editor, an execution monitor (Trakker), but no more games. Games
needed more than programming. You needed someone to come up with sounds and
music. Someone to provide some great looking graphics and what I decided
I needed most of all, someone to come up with a great looking start up screen.
I later took a job writing COBOL on mainframes. Seems like a sellout now, but it paid and still pays the bills. Along the way I met SirKay (his hacker name). He was the only person I knew who had an Atari 800. So I gave the game to him. He liked it (as friends usually do) and he did something I could not. He uploaded it to a bulletin board. Later it found it’s way to Compuserve. By August of 1986 I had become a software hero (as SirKay called it). Tracer had been downloaded over 170 times. Back then at 300 baud I guess that was enough to get an honorable mention.
But in the years that followed the Atari gathered dust and I moved on, along with the rest of the world, to the PC. I did little programming at home, work was enough. In time I had a daughter and I introduced her to the Atari. She refers to playing games on it as playing video games. It wasn’t even a computer to her, but at least it had a life. Tracer however was not one of the games she was attracted to. She liked River Raid better. Maybe Tracer was only "interesting".
When the internet came to my town I got on. As PCs got faster, I upgraded. I wrote IDMS at work and Access at home (a church project). Then one day 12 years after my becoming a software hero I ran into a woman I used to work with. She was now married to SirKay. The next day I got an e-mail from him. Along with some greetings he wrote this:
I hope to shock you with;I figured he had erected some Atari800 worship page. There I found a list of Atari 800 game disk images. The names of all of the games on this page started with the letters T thru Z. "T", "T" ? Why did he send me this page. Well you probably figured it out faster than I did. I looked down the list and behold:http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~aaronat/atari.html
Yes it is!
SirKay was right. I was shocked. I could hardly believe it. My game, alive on the net. That which was dead now lives. I felt like part of me had been reborn. My little game had found a place on the Net.
Name of Game Screen Shot Type Size (bytes) Tracer n/a Action 5704
Somehow it had found it’s way into the hands of the Atari 8 bit
historians. Several people worked on emulators over the years, others gathered
the games and created web sites and now anyone anywhere could run Tracer.
It was one of over 800 games. Not a very good chance that anyone would find
it but it was available to the world. It was still the same APX reject, but
it was mine.