Socrates aka Nintendo for Nerds and My Offbeat Gaming Odyssey

I liked Socrates because I thought the robot was Johnny 5.

When I was a kid Nintendo Entertainment System was the hot ticket item. My parents thought videogames would destroy my mind, so while other kids had NES, I had VTech Socrates. It utilized an infrared keyboard with two wired detachable controllers, it had a few educational games on it, and also a drawing game. Read more about it here if you're interested in the gory details. If you're really interested and want the full 8 bit experience, you can actually emulate it on Archive.org.

It was fine, it was no substitute for an NES but it had a cool robot and I learned math and reading, so that was good. I eventually got a Gameboy, but believe it or not I did most of my gaming on the computer. My parents had an Apple II that I thought was a bank, so I stuck quarters in the disc drive because nobody was watching me. Once it was established that the computer wasn't a bank, my parents eventually got a 286, where I played Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Concentration. I had a strange obsession with Alex Trebek, god rest his soul. He helped me learn to spell too.

Eventually we got a 386 IBM compatible, with Windows 3.11 (for Workgroups) and my dad would hit a BBS or Prodigy and download games unlike anything I had ever seen. I vividly remember playing Duke Nukem for the first time. The Apogee logo, Duke looking pissed, Dr. Proton talking shit, and then you're dropped in to kill anything in your path. Apogee, Epic Megagames... they made some tremendously fun games. Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit, BioMenace... I like a good side scroller.

I also recommend checking out the Sierra games. Kings Quest IV is what I started with... copy protection that tells you to look at the first word of the third paragraph on page 32 to continue. It had multiple discs, and it felt like an open world. Eventually I found Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Police Quest, The other Kings Quests... lots of quests. Also, Sonny from Police Quest looked exactly like my friend's Dad growing up.

You had to have two braincells to rub together back in the day, using DOS wasn't splitting the atom or anything, but people would bitch about it if they had to do it today. You'd turn on your computer and you were presented with a C:\ prompt, at which point you'd stick your floppy disk in and key in A:\ which would open your disc drive. Follow that up with a DIR to see what the hell's on your disk, and then navigate accordingly and execute the file to start your game. Next time we'll talk about QBasic.