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Catcha Snatcha
The Worst Videogame I Have Ever Played
Happy Monday! Every retro computing memory has a soundtrack, and mine has a long stretch of silence in it. For the first months with my VIC-20 the machine could run exactly two things: Gorf, a cartridge that was genuinely excellent and that I played until the joystick fire button had a personality of its own, and whatever I was willing to type in by hand from a magazine. The second category was where most of the hours went. A typical listing took an afternoon of careful transcription, a round of hunting for the one line where I had confused a zero with the letter O, and then rewarded me with a few minutes of amusement before the novelty wore off. Without a way to save anything, every one of those afternoons evaporated the moment I turned the machine off.
Then my aunt gave me a cassette reader. The Datasette was the cheapest storage device Commodore ever shipped, a tape recorder with a plug on it, and it changed the VIC-20 from a typing tutor into a computer that remembered things. It also opened the door to commercial software on tape, and that is where this story goes wrong.
The free game
The shop where the cassette player came from wanted to send me home with something to play on it. This is the kind of gesture small computer stores made in 1983, when a customer who…
