The Impossible Fortress(5)

My question hung in the air as the truth settled in. Jack Camaro was long gone and forty dollars richer. Our dreams of entrepreneurship and financial prosperity went spiraling down the toilet. Between the three of us, we had just $1.52 left over, barely enough to rent a movie.

“Kramer vs. Kramer?” Clark asked.

We trudged off to Video City.





300 REM *** TRANSFER CHARACTER SET ***

310 PRINT "SETTING UP THE GAME. . ."

320 PRINT "PLEASE WAIT. . ."

330 POKE 56334,0

340 POKE 1,51

350 FOR ADDRESS=2048 TO 6143

360 POKE ADDRESS,PEEK(ADDRESS+51200)





370 NEXT ADDRESS


380 POKE 1,55:POKE 56334,125





390 RETURN




BEFORE I GO ANY further, I need to stop and tell you about Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley. This was a video game we played on my Commodore 64 computer, a simulation that pitted human against supermodel in five-card stud. The machine acted as Christie Brinkley, the most beautiful woman in the world before Vanna White came along, and she stood center screen throughout the game. Every time she lost a hand, her blouse or skirt or bra would disappear; the goal was to win her clothes before she won yours. The most remarkable thing about Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley was that you couldn’t buy it in any store. My friends and I were the only people who’d ever played it. I created the game myself by typing many hundreds of lines of BASIC code into the computer.

Alf loved to mock the game’s simplicity. I’d illustrated Christie Brinkley using ASCII characters—a mix of punctuation and mathematical symbols—so she wasn’t much more than a stick figure:

I knew I hadn’t illustrated the Mona Lisa, but I was proud of the game anyway. I’d spent weeks trying to teach the computer the difference between two pair, three of a kind, and a royal flush. I even found a way to make random cards “wild.” Alf didn’t appreciate any of this. He just complained that Computer Christie didn’t have any pubic hair; she didn’t even have wrists.

“Plus her legs aren’t long enough,” Alf complained. “She’s not contortionated.”

“You mean proportional?” I asked.

“Exactly. It’s terrible!”

I tried not to take Alf’s criticisms personally. I reminded myself that he had no idea what went into making a computer game—none of my classmates did. Our high school had a lab full of new TRS-80 computers, but this was 1987 and none of our teachers knew what to do with them. They used the machines to teach typing skills and drill vocabulary words.

Most kids still didn’t have computers at home. I was one of the lucky ones. My mother won the Commodore 64 through a contest at the Wetbridge Savings and Loan. When she first brought it home, I thought it just a fancy game machine—a turbocharged Atari 2600. But after plugging everything together and reading the owner’s manual, I was astonished to learn that the Commodore 64 allowed you to create your own games—space adventures, fantasy battles, race cars, anything you wanted. And just like that, I was hooked.

While my teachers droned on about algebraic equations and the American Revolution, I sat in the back of the classroom, sneaking looks at the Commodore Programmer’s Reference Guide and sketching 8-bit images on graph paper. I subscribed to hobbyist magazines filled with pages of dense BASIC code (FOR X=1020 TO 1933 STEP 3) that readers could type directly into their machines. I often stayed awake inputting programs until one or two in the morning. It was slow, tedious work, but every program taught me something new, and I’d sometimes copy patches of code into my own games. Alf and Clark were the only people who ever played my creations, and Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley was my most ambitious game to date—custom-designed to win their approval.

“Her nipples are zeros!” Alf complained. “That’s the worst part. Who wants to play strip poker with a zero-nippled Christie Brinkley? Can’t you round them off a little?”

This was a few days after the Jack Camaro incident, and we were gathered around the computer in my bedroom, guzzling RC Cola and bored out of our minds.

“I could switch them to asterisks,” I suggested, but Alf and Clark agreed that asterisks looked even worse.

“Forget it, Billy,” Alf said. “Let’s just play something else.”

He ejected the floppy from the disk drive. I tried to grab it before he could see the label, but I wasn’t fast enough. This is what it said: STRIP POKER WITH CHRISTIE BRINKLEY

A GAME BY WILLIAM MARVIN

COPYRIGHT ? 1987 PLANET WILL SOFTWARE

Alf read the label and snorted.

“William Marvin?” he asked.

I blushed. “That’s my name.”

“What, like William Shakespeare?”

Clark leaned over to see. “What’s Planet Will Software?”

“My company,” I said.

Alf laughed even harder. “Your company?”

It was one of those ideas that doesn’t sound stupid until someone says it out loud.

“Never mind,” I said.

But Alf was just getting warmed up. He gestured around my tiny bedroom, pointing at my wall posters of Spuds MacKenzie and bikini supermodels. “Is this your corporate headquarters? Can I be CEO?”

“It’s just a goof,” I told him. “I wrote it on the label to be funny.”