When I was a little kid, we had one of these:

A Commodore 64.

It was the late 80s and we did all sorts of things on that machine. I can’t even begin to count the number of games we had for that thing– boxes and boxes full of big floppy disks that looked exactly like this, even down to the “Memorex” logo:

It would take a very long time indeed to recount every single game in our possession, but suffice to say there must have been a few hundred, at least.

Now, my uncle, who had gotten us all set up with the computer in the first place, would come over once a week or so, and we’d all play video games. It was a family affair. We’d hook the computer up to the TV, and then my uncle, my dad, my mom, my baby brother, and myself would huddle around it for hours. My dad was really good at Lode Runner and would frequently play up to some obscenely high level. My mom, meanwhile, was unbeatable at H.E.R.O. Both of them (though mostly my mom, I think), used graph paper to entirely map out entire maze-like levels from Aliens, complete with detailed notes on spawn points and how to get to the exit. Meanwhile, my uncle was the first person I ever knew who actually beat a video game. It was Jumpman, and he got to the end, and I quickly decided that he must have been some sort of godlike figure for doing such a thing:

He was my hero for a long time after that.

Now sometimes he wouldn’t come over, but we would still play games with him. How? Easy. He’d coded up a Battleship game that could be played over modem, and we’d play that. Online gaming? I was doing it in 1989!

I also played games by myself, of course. I knew how to load them up… typing LOAD”*”,8,1 would boot up just about anything. Or, if you had a disk with a bunch of games on it, you could pick which game you wanted, by typing LOAD”DIG*”,8,1 for Dig-Dug, for example. Yep, I was a pro at this. Then, I’d go play outside or play with toys or something while waiting twenty minutes for the game to load, because that’s just how things worked back then. Of course, when the game did finally load, sometimes I wouldn’t even play it, because I’d be busy holding my tape recorder and microphone up to the speakers and filling cassette tapes up with game music to use as a soundtrack for the epic adventures my toys went on.

Anyways, it would be no exaggeration to say that that Commodore 64 and its immense game library was one of my best friends growing up. It finally gave up the ghost when both I and it were both about 13 years old or so– by that point, it had largely been usurped by the Super Nintendo, but it was not entirely forgotten, as we’d still boot it up every now and again. I’m not sure what my parents did with that old machine. I know what happened to the boxes of floppy disks, though. See, I begged my parents to let me keep them. So they’re in storage now. I’m not sure if they still work or even if they’ll ever run again. But I wasn’t about to let my childhood friends– Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Mancopter and Dig-Dug and Lode Runner and so many others– be thrown away.

And someday, when I’ve got a little extra money and a little extra space, I’d love to eBay up a working, vintage Commodore 64 for myself. Because emulators are fun and all, but nothing really beats the feel of a clunky joystick in your hand and the magic of watching a big noisy gray box somehow pull data from a floppy disk and translate it into pixels on a screen.

You done good, Commodore.