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.
Working on the Loadstar Compleat project has taken up a lot of time, so I keep trying to think of ways to use the things I’ve written for it here on Set Side B. This is the introduction I wrote (edited down to the history, mostly), and a shorter piece on the Eras of Loadstar.
A photograph of long-time managing editor Fender Tucker, holding a pipe in his mouth. (Fender is an adherent of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, of the Church of the Subgenius.)
Loadstar was an incredibly long-lived computer magazine, distributed on disk, for the Commodore 64 and 128 home computers. It began in 1985 and its last issue was distributed in 2007, covering a span of 22 years. It had 250 issues of the main publication, 42 quarterly issues dedicated to the Commodore 128, and numerous side products.
About Loadstar
Loadstar was initially created at Softdisk, Inc. You might have heard of Softdisk as the prior place of work of several employees who left the company, founded id Software, and created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake. It’s possible that some of them might remember the Loadstar guys, but it seems doubtful.
Loadstar was distributed on newsstands up to issue 72, when it switched over entirely to mail-order subscription sales. Despite this reduced exposure, Loadstar soldiered on. Starting with #32, some issues of Loadstar contained two disks of programs and information. These issues became more and more common until, beginning with Issue 43, every Loadstar contained at least two disks until the end of its run.
Loadstar published lots of different kinds of programs! The Video Pro-Titler may still be of use today, if you have need of a simple character generator!
Issue 44 began the reign of Fender Tucker, who would helm Loadstar for the next fifteen years. Fender lent the magazine a distinctive style. He’d write editorials describing the magazine as originating in the “Loadstar Tower,” a wondrous place looming over its home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. (The magazine was actually produced in a basement.) He’d also write up the adventures of his nefarious alter-ego and musician Knees Calhoon, who was listed as the author of some of Fender’s own software. Under Fender Tucker’s guidence Loadstar flourished, and garnered a devoted community of users and contributors.
According to Jeff Jones, attitudes at Softdisk were that the company’s Windows and Mac products were the future of the company, but eventually the internet came along and dashed that dream. Softdisk continued along as an ISP for a time, but around 2006 its services were taken over by another company, and it’s now long defunct. During Softdisk’s later years Loadstar continued to support a large and loyal userbase, and didn’t cost much to produce, so it chugged along well into the internet age.
As Loadstar grew, so did its community, and the technology around it. While the Commodore 64 computer was discontinued in 1994, a thriving market of add-ons and upgrades sprang up to serve its users. Probably the most notable third-party producer of Commodore peripherals was CMD, Creative Micro Designs. While Commodore themselves had made expansion memory modules for the C64, CMD took their ball and sprinted way downfield. CMD made a disk drive accelerator (JiffyDOS), powered memory units that could serve as long-term storage, accelerator boards, and even hard drives compatible with the venerable 8-bit machine. Loadstar’s staff used many of these devices in its later years to help produce their magazine.
Loadstar had a symbiotic relationship for about four years with Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. Some type-in magazines would offer a disk supplement, containing all of the software in an issue on a computer disk and saving users from the need to type them in. Commodore had an arrangement with Loadstar to serve as the disk supplement of their magazines. This deal lasted from around issues 11 to 61, and helped bulk out Loadstar’s issues with interesting software.
Early issues of Loadstar often hosted ports of programs that originally appeared in Softdisk. One notable series of these is the Alfredo animations, a sequence of programs that depicted the travails of a stick man trying to survive a dangerous landscape. See folks, the genre didn’t start with Adobe Flash! Long after its parent Softdisk Magazine closed up shop, Loadstar published two final, original Alfredo adventures, in two of Fender Tucker’s last issues, #197 and #199.
Loadstar never distributed the Commodore versions of GEOS, Berkeley Softworks’ surprisingly successful bid to bring a mouse-driven, icon-based, Mac-like point-and-click interface to 8-bit home computers, but starting with Issue 58 and throughout the rest of its run GEOS programs were a regular fixture on Loadstar’s electronic pages. In retrospect, GEOS was done much wrong. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Berkeley Softworks attempted to bring their OS to DOS-compatible machines with GeoWorks, only to quickly be dismissed as a budget pretender to Windows’ throne. GEOS was far from the first, and certainly not the last, Windows competitor to be steamrollered beneath Microsoft’s hardball tactics. (See: CP/M, PC-DOS, OS/2.) Judging by quantity, Loadstar may be GEOS’ biggest supporter that wasn’t Berkeley Softworks or Commodore itself.
Another company that formed an arrangement with Loadstar was Quantum Compuer Services, which served the Commodore 64 community with an online service called QuantumLink. Several early Loadstar issues came with the QuantumLink client software included on one of its disk sides. (At least one of our included issues has a copy, now useless.) Quantum eventually released a similar service for MS-DOS-based computers, and renamed themselves to America On-Line.
“AOL,” as everyone called it, become a runaway hit. They would build upon its strategy of distributing their disks far and wide, first as 3 1/2″ floppies, then as CD-ROMs, and eventually DVDs. QuantumLink was left to languish and, after a long period of decay where users complained of unmaintained upload sections and unmoderated forums, AOL unceremoniously shut it down without so much as an archive. The later history of AOL is generally known: they bought out their rival CompuServe, AOL keywords were broadcast during daytime television, it was a popular early choice for a dial-up ISP, it became the most-used ISP in the United States, and they created a hugely popular instant messaging program (AOL Instant Messager, or “AIM”). Then they underwent a disastrous merger with Time-Warner that would be hastily undone, then obscurity encroached as first the internet, and then social media, made most of it services redundant. AIM, once thought unstoppable, faded and died as more people used their cell phone’s text feature. As of this writing AOL still exists, but it’s fallen far from the days when its iconic “You’ve Got Mail!” catchphrase became the title of a Hollywood movie, proving once again, truly: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.
The premise of this movie will certainly age well. BTW, the more you find out about the history of movies, the more you come to realize this happens ALLTHETIME.
The Eras of Loadstar
The Early Issues Loadstar started as a C64 counterpart for Softdisk’s self-titled Apple II magazine. Many of its earliest programs are ports of Softdisk software.
Commodore Magazine With Issue 9, Loadstar became the official disk supplement for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. The programs from those periodicals helped to greatly bulk out their offerings. The arrangement lasted until Loadstar issue 61.
The Rise of Fender Loadstar’s longest-serving overseer was Fender Tucker, a kind and genuine person with an engaging writing style. Fender joined up with issue 42, and starting with the next issue, Loadstar moved to two disks a month.
Jeff Jones, Loadstar 128 & Loadstar Letter Associate Editor Jeff Jones joined sometime between issues 49 and 55 and brought some additional technical know-how to Loadstar. In addition to touching up programs and contributing software of his own, Jeff was largely responsible for Loadstar Quarterly 128, their publication catering to Commodore 128 owners, and the Loadstar Letter, a print supplement distributed along with Loadstar.
Puzzle Pages Barbara Schulak’s first program was Jump, published on Loadstar #44, but starting with issue 60 Loadstar published a monthly puzzle section that became the magazine’s most enduring feature. From then, every Loadstar had a Puzzle Page until issue 163, but the feature continued, mostly monthly, until issue 197. Barbara Schulak wasn’t the only contributor to the Puzzle Page, and there were puzzles outside of it, but Barbara was its soul.
The End of the Newsstand Edition Issue 7 was the last issue of Loadstar 128 to be distributed on newsstands, and issue 72 was the last issue of Loadstar 64 to be buyable that way. For most magazines that would have been the end, but Loadstar still had 16 years of life in it, sold entirely through subscriptions, mail order sales, and later via the internet, a testament to the faithfulness of Commodore users.
The European Age At its height around 1991, Loadstar had around 20,000 monthly subscribers. Without the free advertising provided by newsstands, by 1994 that had dropped to around 5,000. As Loadstar reached issue 100 and long years passed, it became harder to find contributions from US subscribers. Meanwhile the C64 was still going fairly strong in Great Britian, and many of the games of Loadstar from this era have a distinct demoscene feel. Loadstar also published demos, and reported on Commodore hacking circles. Loadstar would also embrace the internet, and offer issues for sale by way of their website.
Dave Moorman’s Tenure The writing was on the wall. By 2000 Loadstar had about 1,000 subscribers left, too many to just abandon, but not enough to remain profitable for their then-meager staff. Fender handed the reins off to the worthy Dave Moorman, who kept it going to 2007. Moorman was a dogged manager, and went to lengths to keep the magazine full of items, including frequently reprinting software from the magazine’s glory days. While many of Loadstar’s prior stalwart contributors didn’t switch over, Fender himself still wrote for the magazine, and kept up with it until the end.
The Tornado In 2007 a tornado struck Dave Moorman’s house, and wrecked his Loadstar-making setup. While one more issue, #250, would eke out in 2008, the 22-year run of Loadstar, last remnant of the once-mighty field of computer software periodicals, was over. Loadstar had outlived all of its sister magazines from Softdisk (including its DOS, Windows and Macintosh publications) Softdisk Inc. itself, as well as Compute, Compute’s Gazette, Commodore Magazine, Commodore Power/Play, Ahoy, Run Magazine, Family Computing, Creative Computing, UpTime and DieHard.
(I have been reminded of the value of marketing, so I have to include the $15 Loadstar Compleat package I’ve put together with the permission of J&F Publishing.)
This is something I’ve been trying to make happen for some time. But then some work I put into it hit an unexpected snag (the maker of a library I had been depending on decided he wanted to be paid a subscription fee to use it or else he was going to put a nag screen on people’s projects), then other things came up, and so the project languished for months.
This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned LOADSTAR in these pages. The magazine’s name came from the commonly-entered command on Commodore 64 computers LOAD”*”,8,1, to load the first program on disk into memory, and sometimes also to run it. LOAD”(star)”, you see. I packaged one of its programs, Dungeon, for sale on itch.io for $5 some months back and mentioned it here. This is an opportunity to get the collection it was drawn from. I recognize this is a bit self-serving, but I don’t do it very often, and there’s so much on LOADSTAR that the world deserves to know about. The price of $15 is because that’s what Fender has always sold it for. The issues can also be gotten for free elsewhere, yes. This is mostly an opportunity to get them all at once, and with the Fender’s approval: the person most responsible for all of it, the driving force behind it, the one who always believed the most in LOADSTAR, its very heart and soul.
I had been working for an explorer program for getting the contents of issues and searching through them without having to load each issue individually, but it had been stymied by the issue I mentioned in the first paragraph. Something else I’d like to do is supply an emulator that will run the issues directly, with sensible defaults. The version that’s up has an absolutely ancient copy of VICE for Windows with it. It’s so old that I’m not sure if there might be security issues with it; I should probably just remove it. In any case, current versions of VICE are available for many platforms and are free and open source.
To start an issue, you first start up your copy of VICE. The Commodore 64 emulator included is x64, or else x64sc; the Commodore 128 emulator is x128. Under the File menu, choose “Smart Attach…,” then pick the issue from within the LS64 folder for Commodore 64 issues, or LSQ128 for Commodore 128 issues. Make sure to click the Autostart button: it’ll load the Presenter program and run it automatically! You’ll find both 1541 (*.d64) and 1581 (*.d81) disk images. 90% of the time you’ll want to load the 1581 version, because those disks were much larger and a whole issue could fit on one of them! The 1541 versions (which while growing up I had to put up with) are split up into four disk sides, and are a hassle. By the way: the 1541 disk drive was excruciatingly slow. If you press Alt-W, you can toggle “Warp Mode,” which will speed up loading greatly! Just be sure to toggle it back off once your program has loaded!
And something the collection really needs is a list of highlights of interesting things on each issue, and also a directory of the people who made this unbelievable wealth of software. Here’s a few names to watch for: Jeff Jones (Assistant Editor), Barbara Schulak (Puzzle Maven), Ian Adams (Mathematician), Maurice Jones (Card Game Implementor of Great Skill), Jim Weiler (Third in Command), J.C. Hilty (BASIC Game Programmer who never let it get him down), Nick Peck (Creator of A Couple Of Awesome Games), Jon Mattson (General Gamesperson) and Walt Harned (Pixel Artist Extraordinaire). If I could affix all their names in the stars for the world to see forever, I absolutely would.
To construct the itch.io page I needed some screenshots, so I dipped into a few issues to make them, and got the names of their makers along the way. Here you go, but understand this is only a tiny fraction of what’s included.
Zorphon by Nick Peck, from LOADSTAR issue 39. A rather polished space shooter! The aliens are drawn using character mode. I like the classic Astrocade-like font for the text.Pipe’s Peak by Bob Blackmer, from LOADSTAR issue 73. It looks like an action game, but I think it’s more of a timed puzzle?Outpost by Thomas Czarneki, from LOADSTAR issue 60. A fairly blatant Missile Command clone, but it’s well polished. The opening menu asks if you want to play to lose, or play to win. I think the difference is, playing to lose starts you on Wave 7.King’s Ransom by Scott Elder, from LOADSTAR issue 68. An interesting little game, you control a greedy king trying to scoop up coins before they fall into the lava. When a coin falls off the bottom, a gush of lava shoots up! There’s also skulls to avoid. In one of those little touches that you sometimes find in LOADSTAR software, if you wait on the title screen you get to see a hi-res illustration of the gameplay.Quadrilation by Dave Johannsen, from LOADSTAR issue 68. A two-player game, playable against a computer opponent with four difficulty levels. Take turns placing your pieces so they overlap with as many squares of the same color as possible.Stream, hi-res art by prolific Commodore 64 artist Walt Harned and included as part of The Compleat Walt.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
There’s lots of things that have disappeared from the world in the 35 years the internet’s been around, and very few of them ever come back. Anyone remember Happy Puppy? Midway Games? GameSetWatch?
One of those dead properties was Game Informer, a long-time video game publication that got its start as an official organ of the used game chain FuncoLand, whose ads used to be ever-present in other game mags. When they merged with Babbages to form GameStop, Game Informer went with them. In recent years you could get issues of Game Informer for free from GameStop stores.
Then, I assume as a cost-cutting measure, GameStop shut it down last year. Despite its status as a store giveaway, the publication was pretty slick, and wasn’t without its fans. And lo, it seems they are back! Not just their website but a print magazine too! The new incarnation of Game Informer is unconnected to GameStop, it having been sold to an outside group. According to the company, its entire staff returned to work on the new publication. It seems too much to ask that it be free again, but maybe it won’t be too expensive.
I will admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of GI while they were owned by GameStop. Its focus was solidly on the AAA market that we mostly steer clear of. But it’s good when people working in media get their jobs back, and we wish the staff of the resurrected company well. They’ve even kept up with their reviews, on their first day back they posted 29 reviews of games released during their absence. (It includes Echoes of Wisdom, but no sign of Balatro.) It may be worth following their Youtube channel, which continues on from their GameStop days.
It’s a grievous blow to the game editing community, but Nightcrawler, the maintainer of the 19-year-old hack repository and community site romhacking.net, is shutting its doors. The reasons why are the top news item on the site, probably the last new news item that will ever be posted there.
romhacking.net as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.
They mention several reasons, but say a collection of users who had offered to take up the site for disingenuous reasons. The details were not mentioned, but they mentioned by way of comparison what happened to emulator author Near, creator of higan, and that can be easily taken as a bad sign.
However, Gideon Zhi on Bluesky offers a different take, that suggests comparison to Near is greatly inappropriate, and that Nightcrawler was severely burnt out and refused offers to help. I don’t know which is more accurate, but the details are offered suggest there may be something to his version of events. Gideon Zhi isn’t one, I think, to cover something like that up. Ah well, drama.
Maintaining a hugely popular website for 19 years is a huge drain on your time, energy and finances. It’s possible that ultimately Nightcrawler needed, or even just wanted, to retire, and that’s okay.
I’ve made frequent use of romhacking.net over the years, both in researching two romhack ebooks and the Romhack Thursday feature on this site. While what the maintainer of romhacking.net says in their news post, that there isn’t as much of a need of a centralized site for collecting and presenting romhacks as there was back in 2005, I still found their site extremely useful, and I think it served a vital role. I will greatly miss it, but I understand their wishing to move on. They took the step of uploading the whole site contents to the Internet Archive, which is a forward-thinking move that I applaud.
Will they ever return to updating the site? Anything is possible, but I expect not. Will another site arise to take its place? Who knows, there’s definitely demand for it. I wish Nightcrawler well in any event, and thank them for their service.
Game Informer’s site, as it looked August 2, 2024, R.I.P.
Since then, GameStop has kept the magazine going as a house publication, at times distributing issues for free to customers. It seems the announcement was sudden, with management sending out a tweet about the publication’s closure while staff was being notified of the ending of their positions.
There are older game magazines in Japan, of course, and US game magazines lately have had things pretty tough with competition from the internet. It’s surprising that they’ve managed to keep going for this long.
My already distorted psyche feels pulled in multiple directions lately. In addition to packing up Dungeon for itch.io, creating the manual for it, finishing up a huge update to my Mystery Dungeon book for Limited Run games, researching (meaning: playing) Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, and looking into other things, it’s made it difficult to keep up with the blog. But, keep up with it I am!
Keeping aligned with the C64 angle, Today’s find is COMMODORE FREE Magazine, a long-running Commodore 64 magazine in PDF format that’s been going since late 2006. It recently published its 98th issue, meaning, #100 should be bursting forth before too long! Until then issue 98 features include a history of Commodore’s 8-bit line, a comparison of versions of Commando for their favorite machines, reviews of a Commodore port of Sonic the Hedgehog and the classic title The Sentinel, and a long piece of personal non-fiction by Leonard Roach.
At 15 years running, that starts to put it in striking distance of LOADSTAR’s run! May it keep on keepin’ on.
Lists of the best games for various platforms has been a fixture on the internet since it was opened up to the general public. Every big gaming site, those still with us and those gone (R.I.P. Joystiq) feel the urge to make them periodically. After all, they combine several popular article themes: they’re listicles, they’re about video games, and they make definite-seeming yet inherently subjective statements about things that geeks have over-strong opinions about. They’re the ideal hit-getters for pop culture sites really, whether they focus on games or not.
Even in print, these lists weren’t rare things. Super Play Magazine, from the UK, did such a list in April of 1996, which was reproduced in HTML text by the site RVGFanatic in 2010.
Why would such a list interest us now? Well, most of these lists have a strongly US-focused vibe, and the UK had a somewhat different scene than we (me being American) did. So there are a number of very interesting games on the list that generally don’t appear in other places, including a few Japanese ones. And they included SNES Rampart, so I’m automatically kindly disposed to it.
Of particular note, besides Rampart: three Parodius entries, two Micro Machines games, Pop’n Twinbee, Cool Spot, Samurai Spirits, Hebereke’s Popoitto, Spike McFang, SNES Side Pocket, Xandra’s Big Adventure, Pugsley’s Scavanger Hunt, NFL Quarterback, World League Basketball (made by HAL!), The Chaos Engine, Street Racer, Super Smash T.V., Lemmings II: The Tribes (but not Sunsoft’s excellent SNES port of original Lemmings?!), Sensible Soccer, R-Type III, U.N. Squadron, SNES Civilization, Out To Lunch (I hadn’t even heard of this before!), Mickey’s Magical Quest, Cannon Fodder, Plok (the Pickford Bros. rule) and Equinox (also Pickford-made, and also highly underrated).
Quick intro this time, because I don’t really know much about the Atari ST, but there’s a huge trove of public domain software for it from the archives of Page 6, as well as magazine archives!
Aah that’s a screen I haven’t seen in a long long time.
1982 saw the founding of the Apple II computer magazine-on-disk Softdisk. Soon after Softdisk Publishing produced disks for other home computers too. One of them, Big Blue Disk, has gone down in history as previous employer of some of the original principals of id Software, especially John Carmack and John Romero. But another of Softdisk’s legacies was their Commodore 64 product, Loadstar, probably the longest-lived Commodore 64 software publisher. They published C64 software from 1984 to 2007. And most, if not all, of it is available online!
Loadstar is yet another of those computer gaming stories that must be told, and I’m in a pretty good place to tell some of it, because I beta tested for them for many of those years, and sold programs to them as well. Yes, several of their releases bear the programmer name John “The Mad Gamer” Harris. You have to understand, this was long before the word gamer reached common usage. In fact, as someone who may have primacy over the use of the term, I hereby forbid its use by anyone with misogynistic, anti-trans or racist intent. It is so decreed, hey-nonny-nonny!
Loadstar was lots of fun. Every month they’d send you two disks in the mail with several new pieces of Commodore 64 software on it. Under the watchful eyes of Fender Tucker and Jeff Jones, and later on Dave Moorman, it’s not that they grew an empire of Commodore programs, but they did manage to sustain that platform for a small but avid userbase for far longer than you’d have thought possible.
I plan to start doing Loadstar reviews eventually, but in the meantime, you can try out some of the later issues of this important piece of computing history at the site linked below. Note that you’ll have to have a means of running C64 software to use them, of course. The emulator VICE is known to work well. And if you want to hear the words of Fender, Jeff or Dave yourself, all three are on Facebook.
This is another huge topic that I should come back to later, but in the meantime here’s an article, mostly about the British type-in scene, from Wireframe Magazinne last year. It mentions the longest type-in game ever, Axys: The Last Battle (Youtube), an Amstrad program that had to be printed in five successive issues, and what it calls the best type-in game of all, Crossroads from COMPUTE!, although I’m dubious about that claim, there were lots of type-ins. It’s definitely great, though. It’s worth a read if you have the time, although who has enough of that these days?
This is Crossroads, yet another thing to add to the stack of future topics. If you like this, you might be interested in Forget-Me-Not, for iOS and Google Play and Windows (on itch.io)
Overseeing the early days of computing was Compute! Magazine, properly stylized with an exclamation point. They got their start as The PET Gazette, changing over to Compute as their focus spread into more types of home microcomputers. Compute stuck around as a multi-platform for some time, but ultimately spun off a couple of manufacturer-dedicated magazines. One of these was Compute’s Gazette, whose name harkened back to those PET-exclusive days. It focused on Commodore machines, and would then outlive Compute itself by some years.
The early years of Compute magazine are joyous. They’re filled with esoteric data, geeking out over low-level coding matters, and lots and lots of type-in programs. But it is depressing to me, reading over the early issues, knowing how numbered are its days. This whole genre of computer magazine, that encouraged users to type in programs, that offered coding tips, sometimes even offered add-on disks of software, is now only a memory. We are all poorer for it.
The writing on the wall for this style of magazine could perhaps be seen as early as September 1982, when Compute published an article about a great new upcoming product from Commodore, the Commodore 64. Not because of the style of the article or anything specific about the computer. Just that, by being so greatly popular, the C64 greatly expanded the magazine’s audience, which would inevitably steer it towards becoming more “mainstream,” which ultimately would be the death knell for a publication like this.
Still, it’s fun to look back on. Here is that article in image form, or you could find it on the Internet Archive, where the archives of Compute live on, for a time.
An extra, from that issue, is an ad for one of Microsoft’s first peripherals, a memory card for the Apple II:
90s Japanese game magazines look so cool! I wonder about those huge pink pauldrons and other jutty bits though. Doors may be a problem for her.
Gaming Alexandria is a treasure, and lately it’s been uploading scans of 80s/90s Japanese game magazine PC Engine Fan to the Internet Archive! Even if you can’t read a word of it, the artwork and screenshots alone make it a joy for the eyes. If you remember and love the look of the early days of Nintendo Power, when its layout and illustration were done by Tokuma Shoten publishing, you should appreciate these.
The PC Engine, a.k.a. Turbo-Grafx 16 (a much worse name really), sits at a sweet spot between old-school pixel art and 16-bit splendor. It was arguably a less capable system than Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis, but it could show more colors, and its games looked a lot more vibrant in print. To a kid in the U.S. at the time, it exuded a strong sense of anime coolness, and I can’t help but feel a bit of that old excitement.
I have to stop myself from filling this post with page after page. Here’s a few choice examples:
Gunhead, a.k.a. Blazing Lazers (August 1989):
Compile really designed some crazy powerups for this game!
Double Dungeons (July 1989):
We present the Gary Gygax weapon collection, curated by Dr. Pumpkin Boy.I have it on good authority that this game is nowhere near as cool as this page makes it seem.
The style of this page serves to make the reader forget the game is just plain ol’ Altered Beast, the lackluster pack-in for the Mega Drive/Genesis. Even in the arcade it wasn’t that great.
