When I was eleven years old, and still living in Beirut, my parents took me to a computer show, the first I’d ever attended. I remember almost nothing about it, and would likely have forgotten the event entirely were it not for a single image that seared itself in my mind and still, 22 years later, burns as brightly as it ever did: an Atari 400, sitting on a long table among a bunch of other computers, displaying a low-res image of the Lebanese flag on a small color TV set.
It’s difficult to say why this unimpressive device had such a huge effect on me. It was a lumpy, beige little thing, with a flat pressure-sensitive keyboard sitting on top of an anemic 1.8 MHz processor and a paltry 8K of RAM. It was also the most beautiful thing on earth. My desperate need to own it was a visceral, physical thing, an actual pain.
I don’t remember how much it cost, or whether it was even for sale. I’m quite certain that it would have been obscenely expensive, however, and that I was compelled to leave without it. The experience very nearly scarred me for life. I’m sure it’s responsible for several of the minor mental abnormalities that plague me to this day: the unhealthy fixation on ferrets, for example, or the unreasonable fear of gravity. These things did not need to happen.
But three years later, we were in the United States of America, ground zero for the personal computer revolution, and I was the proud owner of an Atari 800XL, the successor to the first generation of Atari machines. It was a work of art, black keyboard molded into an off-white chassis with a cartridge slot at the top, joystick ports on the side, and a raging bitchin’ unbelievable 64K under the hood. I spent a lot of time with my Atari, typing in BASIC games from hobby magazines, writing school papers, playing Enchanter and Pole Position and Frogger and Temple of Aphshai. It was good. It was very good.
But by the time I got to college, my loyalties had shifted. I was an IBM person, suddenly, and grew to disdain the little toy computer sitting on my desk at home. Eventually, I sold it for a pittance, to a pawn shop. It was a terrible mistake, an unforgivable betrayal, and I rue it to this day, and would probably have gone on ruing it forever if it weren’t for Google.
I was poking around on the web a couple of weeks ago when I came across an amazing piece of software: an emulator that runs a miniature, virtual Atari on Macintosh computers. On a lark, I downloaded it, fired it up, and found myself staring, for the first time in nearly two decades, at the white, blocky letters, the blue screen, the little “READY” prompt of my old Atari. It was a revelation, a vision from heaven. I wept.
I have, since then, spent a ridiculous amount of time making my fake Atari work the way I remember the real one working so many years ago. I tracked down a copy of my old word processor (The First XLEnt Word Processor, which I’m using to write this entry), the legendary Atari adaptation of Frogger (which still looks good, and plays great), and a couple of classic Infocom games. I even went to the trouble of finding the emulator’s source code and modifying it to fix a problem I was having with the keyboard: and all of this in the service of a deep desire to make my real computer act like a machine that is twenty years older and several thousand times less powerful. It’s sick and demented, and I don’t understand it at all.
But I can’t deny the urge’s potency. The pleasure I get from reliving this propellorhead aspect of my youth is not only real, it is vividly, orgiastically real, and I find that very, very troubling. When people give up on life, when they’re tired of the present and afraid of the future, they inevitably run back to the halcyon days of their youth, in a sort of misguided quest for simpler times and the peace of mind that came with them. It’s the mental equivalent of moving back home to escape the travails of the real world, the sort of desperate headlong flight that signals a withdrawal from the world into a dangerous kind of unreality founded on nothing more that nostalgia and false memory.
So I’m a little worried about that. I tell my fake Atari about it. Fake Atari, I say, I’m a little worried about that. And my Atari, suspended disembodied in the shell of better machine, senses my distress, and gently exhorts me to play a game of Frogger. Just one game, it says. Go ahead. You’ll feel better. Trust me.
So I do. I insert my fake virtual Frogger disk in my fake virtual disk drive and get things going. I hop across a crowded interstate, avoiding hurtling 18-wheelers and crawling Granny cars and sleek speedsters. I make it to the river. I jump onto the back of a line of passing turtles, then onto a log, then more turtles, then a piece of driftwood, and finally I’m across the river, sitting on one of the lilly pads in my sumptuous suite of lily pads, looking very happy indeed. I do this five more times. Along the way, I pick up an attractive female frog to accompany me, and manage to gobble a couple of flies. It’s all good.
Though not for long. It’s the next level now, and I have to do it all over again, and the cars are moving faster, and the damn turtles keep submerging while I’m on them, and some of the logs have transmogrified into alligators. And I die, over and over again, horribly: I get squashed and drowned and eaten by a world that seems intent on killing me for no good reason.
But my frog avatar seems imperturbable. No matter what happens, it keeps moving forward; bounding fearlessly through traffic, onto unreliable turtles, racing logs, hungry gators, arriving at its little lily pad nirvana over and over again. You’d think the sameness of it all would get to it, eventually; you’d think it would give up and turn back, or not even try to cross the street at all. But it keeps going. It never stops, until it’s been squashed or drowned or eaten five times, until it dies.
I watch the words Game Over scroll across the screen, and listen to my Atari tell me what it all means. This is the way to live, it says. Unflatten yourself, sputter onto dry land, struggle out of the alligator’s belly, keep moving forward, never turn back, until you’re dead. There are always lily pads on the other side, and it’s always worth reaching them, so you might as well keep trying. Besides, what else have you got to do?
Good point, Atari, I say, and start another game. Very good point.