As much as I loved my Intellivision growing up there was one thing that I couldn’t do on it that I could do with my Commodore 64, and that was program. The C64 was my first real experience with a home computer and introduced me to the wonder of basic programming. I have always been a creative person so when I learned that you could write your own programs and make your own games, I became hooked. The only problem was that at the time I was probably eight years old and didn’t have much access to resources.
I remember hitting the few public libraries in my neighbourhood looking for anything related to computer programming, and luckily there was quite a big section. There was also the book that came with the Commodore 64 that explained the very basics of Basic, so I would often read through it and try to understand how to begin my programming adventure. I also had some game programming books, although there were really just pages of code that you had to copy line for line into the computer, which if anyone has done would know how frustrating it would be when you tried to run the program and were faced with Syntax Errors. You would then have to go over every line and look for spelling errors and other mistakes that could bugger up the code. Then there were the dreaded logical errors where the program runs fine but there are issues like messed up graphics or things not moving correctly, those were a pain as you didn’t really get an error message to tell you what was wrong.
I spent a lot of time typing code into my commodore and trying to understand to the best of my knowledge how the code worked, I would often try and manipulate the code and make my own games. I remember one summer I made it my mission to type in this one program called Kablam! (which was basically a knock-off of Atari’s Kaboom!), I think when I finally got it working I spent less time playing it then it took to type it. The code for that game was from a magazine called Computes Gazette, I remember having a monthly subscription and I couldn’t wait until the next issue got delivered so I could see what code they offered. There was no internet at that time so magazines were the primary source of new code and programming tips.
As much as I had fun tinkering around with the code and trying to understand it, I realized that my skills were okay at best. I really wanted to be able to create games like the ones I was playing on the system. The only problem was that outside of books there wasn’t really any classes that I could take to improve my skills. The school I was in did have a computer class, which did help a bit but I felt that it was more geared towards people who had no experience at all. It is hard to believe that at the time most people were not familiar with using a computer, today they are so common. It wasn’t until about grade 10 when I took a basic computer programming class, but again I felt like the majority of the things that were being taught was stuff that I already knew. It was quite funny because when the teacher assigned the last assignment of the year he allotted about two weeks for it, I completed the program in a few days. He looked at my program and laughed saying “Well, I guess your done for the year” so I basically just did what ever I wanted to fill in the time.
After grade 10 I thought I would be able to learn more advanced programming, so I started looking into the courses available. Unfortunately my math skills were just not there so I quickly realized that perhaps being a computer programmer was not the right career path for me. So instead I just decided to use my programming skills for fun and continue to tinker, the only thing was that I no longer had a Commodore to program on. It wasn’t until we got our first PC that I was able to keep programming, we had a software called Qbasic so naturally I searched all over until I found a book on how to program in that language. Even though the code was a little bit different I was able to apply my skills that I learned from the Commodore 64 and create some interesting programs, the same applied when I took a Multimedia course that introduced me to Flash and Director. I found Director to be so much fun (even though the coding was not Basic, it used its own called Lingo), I went through a phase where I programmed Donkey Kong, Frogger and Pitfall!. Again I think I ended up having more fun making coding the games than playing them, perhaps there was hope for me after all but for now I will just continue to have fun!
Brian Pudden