I Just Remembered The Best Video Game Setup Of The 1980s: Cold Start

Yesterday afternoon I took a break from writing to do some work on our member perks, like birthday car drawings and the thing that was taking the most time, making graphics for our new randomized member perk. You see, for renewing members, instead of getting another car drawing, I’ve been hand-making graphics on an old Apple II computer from the 1980s and writing BASIC programs to generate randomized, unique images. Last year we did robots; this year, we’re making cars.

Now, to make these cars, I need to make a lot of pixel art, and I’ll be honest, it’s been a bit slow going because the program I’m using is a bit wonky when it comes to saving things, which makes me nervous. But I’m doing it. And I was doing just that yesterday, on these old Apple IIs, and all that 80s computing triggered a memory of something fun I haven’t thought of in quite a while, but I want to share with you.

Now, it’s not car related, well, at all, so nobody tell David I’m doing this. But I hope you’ll get a kick out of it anyway. It’s about how my longtime friend Jeremy and I figured out the absolute best way to play a particular videogame on his old Apple //c when we were both about 14.

The game was Electronic Arts’ fantastic arcade fighter jet sorta-simulator-but-not-really, Skyfox:

Now, normally Skyfox was a one-player game, and, if my math serves me right, there were two of us. Sure, we could have just taken turns or whatever, but that’s not as much fun. Skyfox was a game about flying a powerful jet to defend your planet from tanks and big, float-over-a-city spaceships (a Class 6, if you use the Torchinsky Method) and other fighter jets, and there were lots and lots of controls. Some were controlled by the joystick and its two buttons, but there was plenty for the keyboard, too: arming different weapons, setting speed, scanning for enemies, plotting courses, all that sort of thing.

So, it was easy to divide this labor and make it a two-person game. And to do this, Jeremy and I came up with a great DIY method that made everything seem much more, um, real.

You see, where I had an Apple //e with a crappy green-screen monitor, Jeremy had his Apple //c with not just the small green monitor that came with it, but he also had a nice, big, color monitor from when he used to have a Commodore 64. That was also a fantastic machine, but it was a pain to do actual school stuff on, because that disk drive was so damn slow. Much better sound, though.

Anyway, I had scrounged a composite/RCA Y-connector and a few composite cables and with those I was able to connect both monitors to Jeremy’s Apple, like this:

So, now the //c had both a small green monitor and a big color monitor connected at once. We arranged things with two chairs, one in front of the Apple //c with its keyboard and small green monitor, and one in front of the big color monitor, with the joystick. The color screen/joystick was in front, and the green screen/keyboard was in rear:

This effectively made us a little jet fighter simulator: I could be the pilot with the joystick, looking out the big window (color screen), and flying the jet with the stick. Jeremy was my Combat Systems Officer behind me, with his little monitor and all the buttons needed to plot our course and arm heat-seeking missiles or whatever.

We had our own jargon, too, that we made up. I’d say “bring up scopes!” or something, and Jeremy would hit the keys for the big map screen that would appear, and I think we had something for the speed controls, or types of missiles? I don’t know. It was super geeky but wildly fun.

Here’s what the gameplay looked like, if you’re curious:

It’s amazing how much this two-monitor setup changed the game; it became something immersive and something we could do as a team. In hindsight, the game of course seems wildly primitive, but in, what, 1985 or so, this was pretty hot shit. The Apple II was fundamentally a 1977 design and was never intended to do anything like this, but clever programmers were amazing at pushing that machine far beyond what anyone thought it could do.

Our imaginations were key, too, transforming a desk chair and a folding chair and a desk and a dresser into the cockpit of a wildly advanced fighter plane, but it sure as hell worked.

Ah, it was the little things that made childhood fun in the weird Reagan-era ’80s! I’m still close with Jeremy today, if you’re curious, and I’m pretty sure I could re-create this whole setup in my basement. We could re-live our childhoods! Just probably we’d do it a bit more drunk this time, I’d expect.