Recently I had a touch on nostalgia and started looking up some old Atari 8-bit games. When I was young, my family had an Atari 1200 XL, and later I got an 800 XL of my own. This was the first machine I ever learned to program on (in BASIC) and I have a lot of very fond memories of it. We had literally thousands of games for it (though 40-60% of those were most likely duplicates). 99.9% of them were pirated. There was a pretty big scene of people trading compilation disks of cartridge rips and unprotected games. Somehow we got a copy of everything. Usually it was a 5¼" floppy disk that had a simple menu and 5-10 choosable games.

It amazing looking back now how simple these games were. And even more amazing to realize how bad I was at them. I never finished most of the ones that could be. I must have just been an uncoordinated kid.

Here are some of my favorite old-time nostalgia games:

• Ghost Chaser - This one is weird! And the eyes on the painting follow your character. (That used to scare my brother)
• Necromancer - So HARD! Especially today, I can't raise more than 2-3 trees. I used to be able to get a whole row of them. Very original idea for a game though.
• Alley Cat - Bill Williams really features quite a bit on this list. This one was a fun classic.
• Spy Hunter
  An iconic arcade port. I'm sure it was out for every other platform at the time.
• Fort Apocalypse - Strange that the first thing you have to do in this game is Top-off your gas tank?!?!
• Blue Max
• Ghostbusters
• Spy vs. Spy - This is a sure-fire way to start a punching fight between two brothers.

My brother also liked:

• Stealth

It was on the Atari that I had my first real exposure to computer programming. I wish I had had someone who knew more about it to teach me, but I picked up quite a bit from Antic and Analog in programming BASIC. Later, in Jr. High School I had some computer classes that were taught using the same 8-bit Atari's I remembered from a few years earlier. Although, they were kind of out of date by then. I learned a lot more then, but never really learned the stuff I was really interested in, Player Missile Graphics (Atari Hardware Sprites) and Assembly Language Programming.

• BASIC
• PASCAL - This was my first exposure to structured programming. Draper Pascal compiled to bytecode and wasn't super fast, but it worked.
• ACTION! - I remember wanting this really bad back then but it was impossible to find, or way too expensive -- or both!
• ASSEMBLER
• Deep Blue C - We had a copy of this, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work. And there was no one to show me.
• LOGO - We played around with this a little in my Jr. High class to start out.