Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From TerminalMontage, who’s shown up here multiple times before. I thought maybe I might have already posted this, but a quick search seems to indicate that I haven’t, and it’s a useful intersection between Nintendo things, roguelike things, and silly things.
Specifically, this Something (5½ minutes) is About the original releases of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team, Red and Blue. And you’ll probably best see what all the About is about if you’ve played the original.
I’ll throw in some notes about the references in this video:
The rescue mechanic, which involves teleporting rescued Pokemon. How the hell does it work?
Kecleons, the shopkeepers in PMD, are as scary as depicted here. To think that this would be a lasting legacy of the Nethack Devteam’s Izchak Miller.
The music in the volcano segment is from the game, and it does the thing that the kids these days call “slaps.”
Make sure to fast forward through the credits for a final closing gag, where we find out who Cyndaquil really is.
I’m still deep in the 8-bit computing weeds right now, and I always look to connect what I’m personally researching with what I put up on Set Side B. So lucky you, what I’ve been looking at today is The 8-Bit Guy’s videos about the history of Commodore!
It’s a series of videos (yes, on Youtube) exploring the history of that company, both lauded and hated. They released one of the best-selling computers of all time in the Commodore 64, but founder Jack Tramiel wasn’t all that great a guy. Word is the C64 was priced so low because he held a grudge against Texas Instruments, a calculator company Commodore competed against, so he moved to undercut and destroy their sales of the TI-99/4A, turning it into just another computing history footnote. He also bought rising star MOS Technologies, which had a terrific things going with the ultra low-cost 6502 processor, but then basically only used the company as Commodore’s bespoke chip fab.
But say what you will about Tramiel and other strong personality company Presidents and CEOs, when they’re successful, their ups and downs make for interesting times, to read about and hear. So “hear” you go!
The series is collected into a 13 video playlist, 8 parts of the series itself averaging about 25 minutes each, plus some extras. It’s a tale that begins with one of the first (if not the first) pre-assembled mass market personal computers, and ends with the Amiga. If the dice had only rolled differently (and maybe if Tramiel hadn’t bee forced out of the company), then instead of Apple rising to become the leading computing device maker in the world, we might be using Commodore C-Phones today.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
In the old old old old old old old OLD* days, people wrote computer programs by either filling boxes on paper cards or punching out squares, like they did (maybe still do?) for standardized tests. The cards would be fed into card reading devices, some of them called Hollerith machines, to be read into the computer’s memory. (Asides: Hollerith machines were invented in the 1800s. IBM’s start was in making them. IBM’s website though won’t be keen to publicize that they were used by the Nazis.)
(Another aside: What do the olds mean? Old #1: before social media. Old #2: before smartphones. Old #3: before Google. Old #4: before before the World Wide Web. Old #5: before the internet. Old #6: before online services. Old #7: before home computers. Old #8, the all-caps one: before timeshares. There is an awful lot history in the early years of personal computing that gets overlooked.)
The ultimate point after all this discursion is that paper, while little used today, is a time-honored way of entering computer programs. A while after that neolithic era, when home computers first hit it big, there grew a market for programs that weren’t as big and expensive as boxed copies on store shelves. That was the age of the type-in program magazine.
It’s the same age that that Loadstar thing I keep bringing up belongs to, but truthfully it lies only on its edges, as it was a disk magazine, created specifically to bypass the trial by fire that type-in magazines subjected its users to: sitting at a keyboard for hours, laboriously entering lines of code, or even plain numbers, in order to run some simple game, novelty, or other software. Loadstar itself served as the disk supplement, that is, media that carries all the programs from a print magazine’s issue, for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. (That age of Loadstar stretches from issue 9 to 61.)
I don’t know when the first magazine that published software in print form was, that’s a solid fact kind of question, there definitely was a first at some point, but there’s been tens of thousands of magazines, some of them really short-lived and obscure, and there’s a great many edge cases to look out for. Mad Magazine, to offer just one example, published a type-in in one issue.
To state that solid fact definitively requires more time and resource access than I have. But a strong claim could be made for The PET Gazette.
Computer magazines used to look like this! That’s what they’ve stolen from you!
The PET Gazette’s first issue was near the end of 1979. It was more of a fanzine, with a few aspects of a science journal, than a general magazine. It served a highly motivated and focused audience, the kind who would drop $800 in 1970s money on a machine that had 4 or 8K of RAM. The kind who thought making a machine perform automated calculation or data manipulation, all by itself, seemed really really neat. (I kind of feel that way, even now.) The kind like that, or that else bought one of the even earlier kit computers, like the KIM-1, which users had to assemble from parts, soldiering iron in hand, and for which a video monitor was a hopeless extravagance.
I would say at this point that you might know PET Gazette by its rebranding in the early 80s, to COMPUTE!, title in all caps, with exclamation point. But then I would be expecting you to say “Wow, I had no idea!” But who these days even remembers Compute? (I’m not going to persist in replicating 45-year-old marketing stylization, I have difficulty making myself type Xbox.)
As its title indicates, PET Gazette focused primarily on the PETs, along with the KIM-1 which is like a sibling. Compute served a community of users of many different platforms, of like half a dozen: Commodore microcomputers of course, but also Atari 8-bits, the Apple line, the TRS-80s, the early days of the IBM PC, and at times even some more esoteric models.
Compute’s first issue. At the start, it used a period in its title instead of a bang.
Compute’s last issue. It had dropped type-ins a few years before. By this time it had dropped the exclamation point and was owned by the publishers of Omni (hence the font of its title). It got sold to the murderers of many a tech magazine, Ziff-Davis, in order to get ahold of its subscriber list.
Compute soon spun off two or three subscriptions for specific platforms, for users who wanted more than what was limited, by space reasons, to one or two programs an issue. By far the most significant of these was Compute’s Gazette, its title a tribute, to those who knows, to the Compute empire’s origins.
I’ve mentioned here before, certainly, that Loadstar lasted for a surprising and amazing length of time, 22 years. Compute’s Gazette (Internet Archive) wasn’t nearly so long-lived, but it still made it pretty far. Wikipedia claims that it survived to 1995, but really its last issue as its own magazine was in 1990; then it persisted for a bit as an insert in Compute, then as a disk-only periodical.
Look at that cover! Distinctive! Informative! Interesting!
…and the last cover. I don’t think it’s nearly as interesting, but by that point it was lucky to be a magazine at all.
Fender Tucker tells me that when Compute’s Gazette closed up, they paid Loadstar to fulfill their remaining subscription obligations, so at least they did right by their remaining customers. It was a dark day when CG perished, though, the former heavyweight of the type-in scene.
Some other type-in magazines of the time were Ahoy! (again, with an exclamation point):
Ahoy also had a distinctive design!
…and Run:
The word has arrived via the Floppy Days podcast that the Compute’s Gazette may soon return. What really happened is that James Nagle saw that the trademark had lapsed and registered it himself. There’s no continuity of editor, writer or IP with the original. Yet I still hope that Nagle’s effort, which rebrands the Gazette as supporting all retro computing platforms, succeeds. His heart is in the right place at least. Here’s their website. I hope that they at least have the sense to offer a way to enter programs other than typing them in by hand; that was always the worst thing about these magazines.
Smash Melee has had a huge amount of attention payed to it over the years, and one source of player obsession has been the Home Run Contest.
In brief: Smash Bros. games are about racking up damage to a target, measured in percent. The higher the percent, the further an attack target flies when struck. The idea of the Home Run Contest is to do as much damage to a special Sandbag character, which doesn’t move on its own, in 10 seconds, then to hit it as hard as you can, usually with a baseball bat item, to make it fly as far as possible.
The Home Run Contest has been in every Smash Bros. game since Melee, and its first implementation has lots of weird things about it. Like, if you set the game language to Japanese, you get a slightly smaller platform, which makes your distances count slightly longer.
Lots of oddities are pointed out by Youtuber “Practical TAS”, in their 26-minutes video, here. Warning: serious geekery ahead!
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Another find that should be credited to a Metafilter member, in this case AndrewStephens. It’s an interview on the site “spillhistorie.no” with Peter Liepa, creator of the 80s home computer hit Boulder Dash, an early game application for cellular automation. A digging game, like Dig Dug and Mr. Do!, but instead of just dropping single rocks or apples on enemies, falling boulders are an essential aspect of gameplay, as well as gemstones, butterflies and growing amoebas. And oddly, its publisher, First Star Software, still has a living website, yes even in 2025, and may even still be in business, presumably as a company licensing its microcomputer-era products?
Boulder Dash, image from the interview page on spillhistorie.no.
Please take a moment that Peter Liepa is still alive, and willing to talk about his work, for which the same can’t be said for Doug Smith, creator of Lode Runner. There, that’s enough maudlin talk. Time to dig out from beneath a pile of boulders; no one else is gonna do it for me.
