I just spent the last hour killing Nazis, zombies and a giant robot Hitler. That was me, playing a computer game.
So, a brief recap: a few weeks ago, I bought a first-generation iMac for $20, mostly because the guy selling it offered to throw in a flat-screen monitor for the G4 tower I was also taking off his hands. Running OS 9.2, the iMac is a speedy little machine, no great performer, but still an interesting conversation piece, especially parked in my basement lab/studio/geek museum.
The kids were fascinated by it, and after I loaded it up with Myth: The Fallen Lords, Wolfenstein 3D and a pile of old Atari games, it got about a half hour of attention from them before they started thinking about the Wii again. And so, iMac has been sitting here on my desk, beside my other Macs, just being green. Because Bondi Blue was green. Sorry, but you know that’s true.
And then I remembered a strange package I received from the mighty Cogs, a listener who has sent me some … interesting packages. In one mailing, which included electron X-ray machine filaments, a book about Tsetse flies, his old parking pass and a picture of Bea Arthur with hearts drawn all around it, he also included a CD-ROM from Mac Addict magazine, dated Dec. 96.
- The odds are good that I had this CD-ROM when it came out, as this would have been issued during the time that I owned a Mac LC 475 and bought Mac Addict regularly. However, the LC 475 did not have a CD-ROM drive.
So I popped the disk into the iMac, and discovered a pile of OS9 freeware, shareware and demos that reminded me that I played a fair number of early Mac games back in the ’80s and ’90s, like the one where you had to push bags of money around, and that Tron ripoff, and, of course, Wolfenstein 3D, the original shooter. This version has a pile of add-ons, which flashed me back to Monday nights in the mid-90s, when my then-wife would play volleyball with the girls and I would stay home, tinkering with my Mac and playing W3D.
And that’s what I did tonight. Rockin’ music. Fun game. Good memories. The Cogswell Effect.
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