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I forgot how bad things were

29 January 2026

Modern computer games are incredible.

Photorealistic imagery, virtual worlds that extend almost infinitely, the ability to team up with friends and allies on the other side of the world to do battle against NPCs or other teams – the capabilities are extraordinary.

I guess kids today (ah, you know you’re old when you use that phrase) just do not realise how much things have changed in the almost 50 years since home computer games became a thing.

They haven’t suffered the joys and frustrations of having to type in hundreds of lines of code from the latest issue of some microcomputer magazine – only to find that a single digit in a massive block of "DATA" statements is wrong so nothing works.

They haven’t had to deal with gaming on monochrome displays with pixels as big as your thumb. They haven’t had to put up with 1-bit audio effects and 8-bit music tracks.

As someone who was there right from the start, I’ve done all this and loved it.

To be totally honest, I started to lose interest in computer games right about the time the graphics started getting really good. As soon as there was enough detail being rendered to tell one player-character from another, the attraction was gone.

Duke Nukem, Captain Comic and Castle Wolfenstein were probably the last computer games I really spent any time playing – that shows you how old I am.

I have never played a single second of more modern titles like Cyberpunk, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and the like and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

However, as part of my "retro" binge right now, I’ve been watching a few YouTube videos on old games and I came across one that really reminded me of just how bad things were "back in the day".

I was always a fan of the TRS-80 microcomputers rather than the Apple II or C64.

Sure, those other machines had vastly superior graphics but their text displays and BASIC were crap which meant that they were frustrating to use for programming, and that was my main passion. By comparison, the TRS80 Level 2 BASIC was pretty damned good and the Z80 processor was a lot easier to use for cutting your own code because, unlike the popular 6502 processor, you didn’t have to deal with Page 0 being almost totally consumed by the system software. For those who don’t know or have forgotten, the 6502, as found in the Apple II, VIC20, C64, Commodore Pet, etc, relied heavily on the first 256 bytes of memory (page 0) to deliver many of its faster and more useful addressing modes – the Z80 did not.

But I digress...

The sorry old TRS80 had abysmal graphics – just 128 x 48 pixels that were actually composed of characters rather than being directly pixel-mapped to memory.

This low resolution, lack of colour and the lack of pixel-level memory mapping made creating arcade-style games for the TRS80 a nightmare and the range of available commercial offerings reflected this.

It was with great nostalgia and more than a little cringing that I watched this video:

Owch! Things were bad, so bad!

Yet, despite all these limitations, those games were captivating and I recall spending many (far too many) hours pounding away at the keyboard in pursuit of a high-score.

Even now, I’d love to play some of those games again – just for old time’s sake. Odds are that I’d enjoy them more than a modern title.

Perhaps one of the attractions of those old games on old hardware was that *anyone* with modest programming skills could create their own games of this calibre. You didn’t need millions of dollars, a team of graphic artists, 3D modellers, musicians and programmers to roll out a game that might make you rich.

I also tend to think that, perhaps because the graphics were so poor. gameplay itself was the main focus of developers. This made those games more addictive than their modern equivalent, even though they were simpler and less visually stunning.

Ah well, if I ever get time I might just write a few retro-games for one of the many TRS80 emulators that can run on the Raspberry Pi.

Carpe Diem folks!

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