Apple II Bits

KansasFest 2017 is this week, and more than a dozen attendees will be arriving with shirts from KFests past to make a group photo happen. While I was looking for examples of previous such photos, I came across this artifact.

Dain Neater snapped this photo outside Avila University at KansasFest 2002. Here I am, chatting with Ryan Suenaga and Steve Gozdziewski. In this moment, Ryan is in his first year as editor-in-chief of Juiced.GS, and Steve is the committee chair of KansasFest.

Legends.

When I think back to those early KansasFests, what I remember most aren’t the sessions or the product reveals; it’s the camaraderie. It’s finally meeting people whom I’d known for years from GEnie or CompuServe and clicking with them immediately. It’s the laughter of delight in being among people who get each other. Ryan and Steve were a big part of that, not only by creating the platforms, but by also being wonderful people to be around. They were weird and quirky and absolutely selfless, and they shaped my early experiences in the Apple II community.

Ryan died on April 24, 2011, at age 44; Steve passed away on December 31, 2016, at 69. I wrote their obituaries for both A2Central.com and Juiced.GS.

Everyone who attends KansasFest was or is at some point a new friend. And with KansasFest 2017 hitting its attendance cap at one hundred Apple II enthusiasts, I look forward to making many new friends this year.

But damned if I don’t miss the old ones.

Earlier this year, I wrote a tribute to an Apple II user who had passed away — something I’ve now done too many damn times. But in remembering Steve Gozdziewski, I also recalled sharing this moment with him at KansasFest 2002:

Many of those pictured had been coming to KansasFest for years (2002 was the event’s fourteenth year, and my fifth), and we spontaneously decided to represent our long lineage by donning the various years’ shirts that we’d happened to bring with us. (We staged a similar shot another year, though I can’t seem to find it in the available archives.)

That got me thinking: why not plan another shirt photo? With this month’s KansasFest being the 29th, it’s unlikely we’ll have representatives from every year — but it’d be fun to try!

So if you’ve ever attended a previous KansasFest and are one of the hundred who are coming to KansasFest 2017, please use the below form to indicate which years’ KansasFest shirts you own. A week from today, July 10, I’ll email everyone their packing instructions to ensure we show up in Kansas City with as complete a set as possible!

Let’s create another photo by which to remember the many years and friends we’ve shared across the decades.

It’s not often I get to evangelize the Apple II outside our own community — KansasFest, Juiced.GS, and the Retro Computing Roundtable are preaching to the choir, essentially. When I do get to speak to other audiences, it’s usually those who "get" retrocomputing but may not know the details of this specific platform.

Such was the case in 2012 at @party, a demoparty held annually here in Boston. It’s a venue for programmers of any and all retrocomputers to strut their stuff by creating the most complex, elaborate, and impressive graphical and aural demos in the most constrained spaces. Despite not being a programmer, I attended the founding event in 2010 and was invited back in 2012 to represent the Apple II community.

My favorite anecdote of that day came when I bumped into another attendee outside the event venue. The front door was locked, and while we waited to be buzzed in, we introduced ourselves by first names. I asked what Mike’s interest was in the demoscene, after which he asked why I was attending. I said I was one of several people invited to represent various communities. Mike asked what community I was representing, and I said the Apple II.

At which point he stopped, looked at me, and exclaimed, "You’re Ken Gagne!" Who knew Mike Erwin was an Open Apple listener?

That wasn’t the only revelation of the day. The presentation I gave, "The Apple II Lives! KansasFest And Beyond", a variation on a presentation I’d given to the Denver Apple Pi users group the previous summer, cited many examples of games that had made the Apple II both popular and memorable. My goal was to not only demonstrate the impact that the machine had had on the computing landscape of the 1980s, but to appeal to the nostalgia of the audience’s non-Apple II users who may’ve nonetheless encountered these franchises on other platforms.

The presentation (executed in Prezi) was well-received, but the most surprising response came from someone who had used the Apple II solely as a productivity machine. Her experience had been limited to VisiCalc, AppleWorks, and Dazzle Draw, completely omitting such classics as Lode Runner, Choplifter, Ultima, and King’s Quest.

I was sad that anyone would come so close to such a great gaming machine and have overlooked what made it great to me — not everyone is a gamer, but I know this person to be, and while her background with the Apple II was as valid as my own, I couldn’t help but feel like she’d missed something wonderful. But I was also glad for the opportunity @party presented me to give a more complete picture of the Apple II’s legacy and livelihood. It’s never too late to discover the Apple II’s library of games!

Today is the first day after KansasFest 2016. It’s a day when I, like all 83 of this year’s attendees — the largest turnout in my 19 consecutive years of attendance — am in a delirious stupor from too much excitement and too little sleep. I have unpacking to do, software to test, publications to read, photos to process, and memories to cherish. It’s an event that will stay with me for a long time — at least until KansasFest 2017, scheduled for July 18–23 at Rockhurst University.

In the meantime, I admire all the contributions made by the attendees and the committee, from organizing the event to giving presentations to livestreaming the videos. But as a YouTube content creator, one of the KansasFest creations I admire the most comes once again from Steve Weyhrich. Just prior to KansasFest 2015, Steve — who once built an entire Apple II in Minecraft — debuted the music video "KFest Funk", an inspired parody of the 2014 tune "Uptown Funk". For KansasFest 2016, Steve decided to kick it old school by reimagining the 1982 classic "Eye of the Tiger". The result is the music video "Week of the KFest":

Many of the photos Steve used in each of his last two music videos are my own, yet he puts them in a far more imaginative context than I could ever imagine. Not only that, but his audio and video production qualities are significantly higher than my own, despite his use of iMovie compared to Final Cut Pro. Why isn’t this creative genius a YouTube star?

My thanks to Steve for this fun memento that we can share with our friends and family who don’t quite understand what KansasFest is all about!

KansasFest 2016 is less than a month away, which means I have some preparation to do. Besides being the biggest one-day sales event for Juiced.GS, it’s also an opportunity to learn from some of the best and brightest minds and innovators in the Apple II community. I like to fool myself into believing I belong among such an echelon by submitting a session: it gives me something to do, look forward to, and contribute throughout the week of KansasFest. But what to present?

This year I took Andy Molloy’s advice and settled on a follow-up to sessions I gave in 2009 and 2010: Classic gaming inspirations and classic gaming inspirations, part deux. For old-school gamers, I demonstrated some modern games that are spiritually inspired by our favorite Apple II classics. It’s been six years, during which time Steam and Kickstarter have hid their stride, resulting in an abundance of low-budget, high-quality indie games — just like we used to have in the day. So for this year’s session, I’m limiting my selections exclusively to Steam:

Steam is the largest online marketplace for PC, Mac, and Linux games, making it easy for independent game developers to distribute their software. But indie game developers often lack the resources of major game studios. What they lack in funding, they make up for in creativity, turning to classic games and genres for inspiration. We’ll look at many Steam titles where the Apple II influence is strong, suggesting modern games that will appeal to classic gamers.

I’m looking forward to plumbing the roster of games I’ve featured on the IndieSider podcast and possibly discovering some new ones in the course of my research. Any assistance you can provide would be most welcome! What classic games did you enjoy that you’d like to see modern counterparts to — or what modern games have you played that reminded you of classic games?

PAX East, the annual video game convention that attracts 70,000 gamers to my native Boston, is next week. While I’m eager to attend PAX’s 2016 iteration with Juiced.GS associate editor Andy Molloy, I was recently surprised by the conclusion to a chain of events that prompted me to recall our time at PAX East 2013.

It started last week when I received a Kickstarter update from The Videogame History Museum. I’d backed this project to create a physical museum for video games, computers, and machines back in 2011; this update was the first peep I’d heard from the project since 2012. I’d honestly forgotten it was a thing, but here was news that the project had been realized, and the doors had opened on their space at 8004 Dallas Parkway, Frisco, Texas.

Texas is a long way from Boston, so rather than check the place out for myself, I sent the news to two KansasFest alumni from Texas: Mike Whalen and Michael Sternberg. I should’ve known they’d be on top of a museum opening in their own backyard, as sure enough, they were quick to respond that they’d attended the opening weekend. Whalen further sent along some photos that he hadn’t found a place to host. I offered to publish them on Gamebits but recommended that, in the meantime, he share the photo of the museum’s Apple II with the Apple II Enthusiasts group on Facebook.

Up went the photo… which looked familiar to fellow Bostonian Paul Hagstrom. “I think that’s actually the very system that Wayne, Ken, and I put together,” he remarked.

Omigosh — he was correct! I didn’t immediately recognize it, but that Apple II was donated by Wayne Arthurton, with joystick and monitor by Paul, physically transported to PAX East 2013 by T.J. Awrey, and coordinated by me as a donation to the Videogame History Museum. Look!

I’m awaiting official confirmation that this is indeed the same system, but given that it’s the same organization at both PAX East 2013 and in Frisco, Texas, I believe it is. Three years ago, I wrote, “The Apple II was not just a temporary exhibit for PAX East; it has been permanently donated to the Videogame History Museum and will make appearances at conferences and conventions throughout the country, such as the Game Developers Conference, MAGFest, and PAX Prime.” But I never imagined that it would become a literal museum piece. How amazing that a donation that was intended to benefit a single event will now be preserved for all time.

Now I know not to expect its appearance at next week’s PAX East 2016, but in the meantime, you can read the original blog post from 2013: