Welcome to our computer laboratory of horrors! Come as we take a tour of some of 8-bit computing’s most unloved monstrosities. Our terrors today come in two categories: First, you may not know this, but [more…]
Pac-Man was the hottest arcade game of 1981 and Atari saw an opportunity to capitalise on it with a VCS version… By the end of that year, people had pumped more money into Pac-Man machines [more…]
In the previous two issues of Paleotronic I have written about RPG games, their origins, the games credited with being the first of their kinds on home computers in the RPG video gaming category. Midi [more…]
Once upon a time… …in a land far away lived Jack and Jay. Jack was the Commander of an armada known as Commodore, while Jay was a Grand Wizard in the royal court of the [more…]
Did you miss it last year? Well, here’s another chance to check out Paleotronic’s 12 years of Retro-Christmas, a series of 12 mini-mags looking back at consumer electronics covering the years 1980-1991. It was the [more…]
My task, should I accept (and you did – Ed) was to write an article about Christmas Lemmings as a segue into Lemmings in general. The reason behind this, is simply to meet my brief [more…]
At the time of writing, the holidays are almost upon us. At this time of year we usually have friends over for some food, talk and games. This is where it gets a bit awkward, [more…]
The second prong of Bushnell’s two-pronged effort to bring arcade games to more children was a secret project codenamed Stella. In 1975 Atari had successfully converted its smash-hit Pong arcade machine into a home version, [more…]
Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell was facing a serious conundrum. His ‘video computer system’, a cartridge-based home video-game console designed to play versions of popular Atari arcade games, was certain to be a big hit, but [more…]
Brøderbund Software Inc. was founded by brothers Doug and Gary Carlston in 1980 after Doug had written Galactic Empire, a space strategy game, on his TRS-80 (retro-trivia: many of the locations in the game have [more…]
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