Apple II Bits

The original Prince of Persia game turns thirty years old this October 3, and in anticipation of that anniversary, the game’s original creator, Jordan Mechner, has some news to share.

First, his 1980s development journals, which were previously published in paperback and ebook editions, will be re-published in hardcopy with new illustrations. This version will come from Stripe Press, whose "books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today." The book will be finalized in time for the game’s release anniversary this fall, with autographed editions available next February at PAX East, an annual video game convention that Mechner keynoted in 2012. Since Juiced.GS already reviewed the paperbacks back in 2013, we probably won’t go as in-depth with the new release, though we’ll certainly report the news in DumplinGS!

Being able to publish a book is as magical to Mechner as making a game once was. The democratization of publication he something he attributes the Apple II to initiating:

For me as a kid who dreamed of creating mass entertainment, in the pre-internet days, when you still needed a printing press to make a book and a film lab to make a movie, the Apple II was a game-changer: a technological innovation that empowered every user to innovate. Suddenly, I didn’t need adult permission (or funding) to tell a story of adventure that might reach thousands — and ultimately millions — of people.

Second, Mechner was recently interviewed at Gamelab, a game development conference held in Barcelona. Venturebeat has an edited transcript in which Mechner recalls some of his original inspirations:

Anybody here remember Choplifter? This blew my mind in 1982. It was the first game I’d played that told a story. Asteroids, Space Invaders, you had three lives and you had to get a high score. All of that was based on the business model of putting quarters into machines. Choplifter told a story, and at the end it said "The End." That was the inspiration for my next game, Karateka.

Third, Mechner not only reflected on the past but also looked to the future, noting that there is no new Prince of Persia game to announce — yet:

Many of you have asked when there will be a new PoP game (or movie, or TV series). If you feel that it’s been a long time since the last one, you’re not alone. I wish I had a magic dagger to accelerate the process… [but I’m] in the midst of longer-term projects whose announcement is still a ways off.

Until the new books and possible new games come out, there’s still plenty of Prince of Persia to enjoy. The source code is publicly available; maybe someone can hack in a two-player mode, as Charles Mangin did with Karateka.

Oregon Trail has been adapted, reimagined, and rebooted more times than we can count. It’s become a live-action role-playing game, a movie trailer, and a zombie apocalypse. But at no point has the real-life journey of American pioneers circa 1836 been recreated — until now.

The Oregon Trail is a hardcover book released last summer, with the paperback hitting just this month on June 7. With a title like that, I assumed it to be an ode to the computer game that introduced a generation of students to personal computers. But this book — the fifth from Rinker Buck, born in 1950 — is something far more daring. Here’s an Amazon.com synopsis from Jon Foro:

Well into middle-age, Rinker Buck found himself divorced, at the edge of bankruptcy, and growing blunt through the twin demons of ennui and alcohol … On a whim, he found himself in a museum at the head of the Oregon Trail, realizing that even as a fairly serious American history buff, he knew virtually nothing about the pivotal era when 400,000 pioneers made their way West in quests for land, gold, and new lives. On a much bigger whim, Buck decided to travel the 2,000 miles of ruts and superseding highways in a mule-driven wagon on his own “crazyass” quest for a new beginning. The result is a dense-yet-entertaining mix of memoir, history and adventure, as Buck– joined by another brother, Nick, and his “incurably filthy” dog, Olive Oyl–struggle with the mechanical, environmental, and existential challenges posed by such an unusually grueling journey. Buck is an engaging writer, and while the book pushes 500 pages, the story never lags. By the end, you’ll know more about mules than you ever thought you would (just enough, actually), and you’ll have a better perspective on the Trail, its travelers, and the role it played in shaping the modern United States. (And is Rinker Buck not a pioneer-worthy name for an tale such as this?)

The book is available now on Amazon.com. Here’s an excerpt of the author reading from the audiobook:

I’m not a huge fan of history, but The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey hits a sweet spot by intersecting with real and digital history. Even if the book never once mentions the game, I may need to pick it up to see what Buck’s experience was and how it compares to that of the early settlers after two hundred years.

Books about Apple and the Apple II and its founders and inventors are innumerable — history has woken up to the importance of these industries and innovators. But the Apple II plays an important role not just in fact, but also in fiction. A voracious reader of sci-fi and fantasy, I’ve recently come across references to our favorite computer in a number of novels.

First was in Ready Player One, a novel by Ernest Cline and the best book I read in 2011. The main character spends most of his time plugged into a virtual-reality MMORPG designed by a "a god among geeks, a nerd ueber-deity on the level of Gygax, Garriott, and Gates." In his quest to unearth an Easter egg, our hero, having received a clue pertaining to Captain Crunch, researches interstellar maps for a relevant planet. "I found a few worlds named after famous hackers, like Woz and Mitnick, but none named after John Draper."

Any book with an entire celestial body named after Steve Wozniak is okay by me!

Last year, I read my second-ever e-book: These Days, a novel by Jack Cheng that I picked up through its Kickstarter. This book’s main character, Connor, is a graphic designer for a company called Pseudo. At one point, he is asked: “Do you know who Doug Engelbart is?”

It took a moment for Connor to place the name. One of the few entertainment projects Pseudo had been able to land was a series called ArpaNet, a failed attempt at capitalizing on old-school detective shows and eighties nostalgia. Every episode, the show’s protagonist, Frank Arpa, a university professor who moonlighted as a private investigator, would log on to the bulletin board systems of the early internet to hunt for new leads. Whenever progress on a case stalled, a mysterious informant who went by the handle of Lick would steer Arpa and his team in the right direction. The network had shelved the series after four episodes, but Connor had had a blast working on the project while it lasted. It was probably the most fun he’d had in all his years at the company. He’d been tasked with recreating the text-only interfaces of the era and spent hours upon hours digging into command prompts on old computer history websites. He watched YouTube videos of ancient operating systems. He bought a working Apple II off Craigslist and experimented with text-only ASCII banners and graphics on the green monochrome screen. In the course of his research, he’d come across a particular black-and-white video shot in the late sixties. In the video, a silver-haired man talked into an operator’s headset as he stared at a monitor off camera. The text on the monitor was superimposed onto his own image as he spoke, and every once in a while the video would cut to a view of his hands. He operated a blocky wooden mouse and a keyboard, and a second pad that looked like a section of piano keys, and all the while the computer made strange, abrupt noises that sounded like bursts of a high-pitched electric razor, or the first half of a dog’s bark. "The Mother of All Demos," said the caption beneath the video. And the man in it was Doug Engelbart, the head of a group of scientists at a Stanford research lab. In the video, Engelbart and his team publicly demonstrated for the first time NLS—an early ancestor of the internet—along with hyperlinks, the computer mouse, and videoconferencing, all in an hour and a half.

Now I’m amid a novel by Austin Grossman. I really enjoyed his 2007 debut novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, about the antagonist of a Justice League-like team of superheroes. His April 2013 novel is You, a book that is, inexplicably, set less than two miles from where I live outside of Boston. The main character was born in 1969 (the same year as the author, and a decade before me), and the book is set in 1997 as he enters the computer game industry as a designer. Several flashbacks to his childhood trace the path of his experiences with personal computers. On page 13:

One summer in middle school I finally got an Apple IIe, a beige plastic wedge with computer and keyboard in one piece, along with its own nine-inch monochrome monitor. I discovered the delinquent thrill of using copy programs like Locksmith to duplicate copy-protected games on a 5.25-inch floppy disk and the trick of double-siding a disk by clipping a half-moon out of it with a hole puncher.

On page 66, digging through the archives of his employer, Black Arts, for their earlier titles: "I was sure a few dozen copies were out there lying in basements in cardboard boxes, filed away with cracked copies of The Bilestoad and Lode Runner… [but here] there wasn’t much from 1983 apart from an incomplete set of blue-and-white Ultima III: Exodus floppies."

And on page 81, he lists more games he grew up playing: "Silly 2-D games, little guys jumping around on platforms — Sammy Lightfoot, Hard Hat Mack, cheap Mario Bros. rip-offs. Adventures — Escape from Rungistan, Mystery Mansion."

I’ve not yet finished You, but I’m sure there will be even more references to growing up digital. So far, I find myself agreeing with one review: "You is a brilliantly written piece of fiction from author Austin Grossman. If you enjoy video games, fantasy, science-fiction — grew up in the 70s, owned an Apple II and spent many nights lit by the glow of a monitor screen — if you don’t know who you are or what you want to be, You is a book you canÂ’t miss."

Since none of these books are about the Apple II, it makes it all the more fun to unexpectedly encounter our old friend in these new contexts.

What book would you write to feature the Apple II?

Self-publishing has paved the way for scores of books about computer history and retrocomputing to be published. Niche markets can now economically demand a small printing of a book, giving authors with stories to tell a means to reach their audience. Juiced.GS has been reviewing many of these books as part of its "Cover ][ Cover" series, but new books are hitting the shelves faster than we can read them, as evidenced by the pending release of Dr. Steve Weyhrich’s Sophistication & Simplicity.

It therefore seemed a good time to compile a list of all the books that have been released in the past decade or so that would appeal to the Apple II user. Andy Molloy already has an exhaustive list of vintage Apple II books, so with his permission and with contributions from Bill Loguidice and Mike Maginnis, I’ve compiled this spreadsheet of recent books:

Anyone can edit or copy the information in this Google Drive spreadsheet, should they choose to adapt it its scope. For example, this revision doesn’t focus on books about the history of Apple Computer Inc. or its most famous founder, Steve Jobs. It tries to list all books whether they be print, digital, or audio; you may wish to narrow the list to just one medium.

Regardless, I hope this compilation is a useful starting point for anyone looking to expand their Apple II library or provide such a resource to our fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts.