Great to see a discussion of Greg Kuperburg’s games. I love playing PC-MAN for 3 minutes or so with my oldest son. Perfect amount of time and attention.

I’m currently busy disassembling PC-MAN and trying to cram it into 16kB so it could be run on an original PC loaded from cassette. The game was distributed as a DOS booter and boo floppies required 32k, but PC-MAN is about 17k in size.

Since we're discussing impressive PC games from the 80s, I want to bring up Alley Cat. Besides being a very entertaining game that still holds up (well, if you can bare the PC Speaker beeps and boops), it is also a PC booter like the games mentioned in the post (ported from Atari).

Alley Cat had a very neat trick on the PC: it implemented its own clock independent of the CPU cycles. At the time, many games relied on counting CPU cycles to tell the time. This caused a problem when the next generation of PCs came out with a faster CPU (XT with 286 if I recall), because now the cycles went by much faster, making the games run insanely fast so it was impossible to play (fun sidequest: the Turbo button was supposed to help in this sort of situation). Alley Cat had no such issue since it implemented its own clock, and it can still run today at normal speed just as it did over 40 years ago.

I wrote a “multimedia engine” in those days, also a booter which used no MS-DOS calls, BIOS and assembly only, to render vector graphics on both CGA and EGA-based systems .. the engine was used to produce 3 educational titles before the publisher went under.

Definitely fun days, working out how to be a bit faster than the BIOS and not use a single bit of DOS.

The author mentions his father's "$2000 computer", a figure has no impact in 2025, when $2,000 doesn't seem like a particularly large amount of money to have spent on a state of the art PC.

I'm of the opinion that writers should make it a habit in pieces like these to always include prices that have been adjusted for inflation. In this case, $2,000 corresponds to $6,731.61, which provides better context for the story.

The discussion about the nature of auteur-ship is interesting. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a highly-skilled technician, craftsman or engineer. Some people are able to do things that are genuinely awesome (in the orignal sense) without necessarily showing the intellectual aspects associated with auteurs. They are not less worthy of praise and admiration than good auteurs.

PC-Man and Paratrooper were the very first PC games I ever played.

Obligatory, and perennial, complaint: Most of the images look terrible; they are squashed to a 16:10 aspect ratio, when they should all be 4:3.

I hate squashed screenshots. Does everyone forget that screens used to be 4:3? Does nobody notice the squashed oval shapes of planets (and other circles)?