I’ve no idea what happened to the Atari VCS console after I got my Color Genie, but I suspect after I was bought my first proper computer, the Atari was boxed away and later sold at a car boot sale. Gaming hadn't yet been around long enough for it to be considered retro yet. With the advent of emulation, this is one of the most commonly emulated consoles, and to be fair, there is no value in a second hand Atari VCS, the console just isn't rare enough to warrant a high price, and is very easily emulated.
The shop where my parents had bought the Color Genie soon became my second home every Saturday afternoon. The owner had foolishly told my parents that I could come into the shop whenever I wanted and ask questions about the machine. I was frustrated that there was very little I was able to do with my Color Genie at home and so it rapidly was becoming a white elephant. I rarely touched the Color Genie in the shop and instead spent all my time on the other business machines the shop owner was selling. These were big machines that made a lot of noise and were home to mysterious hard drives full of DOS programs and suchlike. I quickly found my way around the DOS prompt and discovered huge collections of programs and games hidden away in obscure directories. I never did any harm as it was far too fascinating to discover the potential that a computer could hold. I recall my favourite game to play was Space War. It must have been heartbreaking to see a young kid sitting staring at a huge monitor on a powerful four thousand pound IBM compatible PC, and all I was using it for was to play Space War. Although it was a two player game, I experimented and learnt to play on my own. The ships were vector drawn renditions of the USS Enterprise and a Klingon Class Cruiser. I guess the owner eventually got bored of me playing on his IBM and TRS-80 PCs when business clients kept arriving as he eventually hired a shop assistant who was also a talented games programmer who would quietly switch off the PCs while I wasn't looking. To be fair, I did get bored too as there was nothing new being installed, no new software or games. I did enjoy the smell of new computers, and he had his own coffee percolator machine and although I didn't drink coffee, I developed a love for the fresh smell of it.
Jon Roberts seemed impressed with my Color Genie enough that he also bought himself a Genie but unlike me he did manage to program it. Every day after school he would show me the new version of two games he was working on. The two games were a Pacman and Centipede crossover game called Eat-E-All-E (he loved wordplay) and a one on one basketball game for which I think he just called it Basketball. Most of his expertise and knowledge of the machine was gained through a program he wrote which PEEKed and POKEd into every part of the Genie’s memory just to see what would happen. There were a lot of places to PEEK and POKE into, and some crashed the machine, whilst others produced some very interesting visual results which he incorporated into his games. Jon was semi-retired or had money to live on so he didn't need to work. I was jealous that I was at school studying while he got to “play” with computers all day. I am certain if I didn't need to go to school I would have played on the computer constantly. Jon understood computers far better than I could as he was also interested in amateur electronics, and would often build his own little circuit boards. This acute understanding helped him see and understand what the computer saw and how it worked. Both games were written in BASIC, but other than glance at the program, I never really looked into how he got the game to run. I understood most of the BASIC functions and knew what they did, what I failed to understand and exploit was how they could interact together and produce a game, let alone a great one. I certainly didn't have an idea of the kind of game I wanted to write, as that at least would have been a starting point.
In the early 1980s there were many simple BASIC programming books that taught you how to program in BASIC or gave you a listing for you to type in and explore the computer language for yourself. The actual language of BASIC was very simple, but each computer came with its own version of the language meaning you had to learn each of its “dialects” to get a program to work. The programs in these books were small programs of games of chance, basic maze games and used very little processing power, and relied heavily on standard BASIC. Most usually had a section at the back detailing any unique variances between the main micro-computers. All the main home computers came with an instruction manual that was there to help you set up the computer, switch it on and told you how to access simple BASIC functions, but beyond that they were useless. They always came with a recommendation for a bigger or better dedicated instruction manual. I'm certain that if a decent book had have come with the Color Genie or ideally the BBC B then I would have been far happier. For me computers are still a mystery I’ve yet to fully understand. It is a shame I wasn't disciplined enough to stick with learning to program. The trouble was that playing games was far more enjoyable and alluring. Programming looked difficult, time-consuming, and required a good knowledge of maths and numbers which I wasn't brilliant with at the time. You also needed a logical brain as well to work out problems that didn't have an immediate solution. Without heavy processing power, you had to be clever and crafty to make magic happen. I knew of assembler language, the step down from machine code, but that really did require a maths brain and a logical understanding of the way computers worked.
Me and Jon discovered there was a Color Genie User Group that sent out a magazine once every few months called “Chewing GUM”, an amalgamation of Color Genie Usergroup Magazine. It was fairly expensive for what it was, even back in those days. I recall we only got a couple of issues of it before deciding it offered no real content and it was as expensive as any other computer magazine at the time and was little more than a sixteen or so page highly glossy magazine that was mostly filler and adverts. The first issue I got had a type-in computer listing program which would play the Star Wars theme through the computer’s sound chip. I typed it in and it sounded horrible, all the notes were out of tune and sequence. I checked the listing several times to ensure I had typed it in correctly and after wasting an entire afternoon, I gave up. The very next issue (two or three months later!) they published an apology and correction to the listing so the music sounded correct. I wasn't happy to have wasted so much of my time. I did type it in again and it did sound better, but I felt let down as well as seeing them waste several pages again reprinting the whole listing again.
Jon did try to sell the two games he had written in the Chewing GUM magazine with a small quarter page advert. Considering the computer had very few programs for it we both thought it would sell very well. Sadly, instead of selling loads of copies he eventually sold both games together when he got just one enquiry. I did playtest the games for him, but playing the same two games every day for months on end just got seriously boring. The basketball game only had a computer opponent who moved in reaction to you. I remember Jon had big issues programming the computer player to make mistakes and allow you to score a basket. It didn't play anything like a basketball game should play like. My only comparison to his effort was the Atari VCS Basketball game. His Pacman game was set in a garden where flowers slowly began to grow, and you ate them all up. Ghosts would appear and a Poltergeist would throw stars at you to keep you moving. He kept backups of every version he created, he was very disciplined like that. Of the two games, it was his Pacman game that I enjoyed more. The game evolved from the limitations of what he could program and the quirks and features of the game itself. I think it was that poor selling experience that put him off computer games and instead he turned his attention to using the computer as a database within business applications. One such application was a second hand car database that didn't do very well. He and my dad came up with the business idea of Datacars. An index card based database of people selling cars, and we would match them to buyers. They tried really hard until a competitor saw what they were doing and really pushed the idea and spent large amounts of money promoting their business model. After that, Jon packed the Color Genie away and I never saw him use it again.
I did manage to buy just one game for the Color Genie, a text adventure game set on an alien planet and you were the spaceman on a crashed spaceship. I never did complete it, but found out several years later it had a bug preventing you from solving an early puzzle. It meant no matter what I tried, there was no way to escape the ship. It ruined my taste for text adventure games for many years afterwards and was always resentful of adventure games after that. My taste for adventure was only resurrected with the advent of The Secret of Monkey Island over ten years later. At that time my dad bought me a second hand television so I could use the computer in my bedroom and I would no longer monopolise the television in the lounge or spend so much time in the computer shops.
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