A salute to some nerds.

I've played a lot of video games in my life, and I'll admit that my sister and I got into rom games in the early '00s. We ignored any legal trouble we may have eventually faced and got to play NES and SNES games we never played before. My sister downloaded quite a few RPGs for the SNES. I didn't get a chance to play those but I did play through the original Earthbound on the NES in the middle of the worst semester I had a college. (I was already doing terrible and some classes were not salageable at that poin.)

I've played games from severable systems. Besides NES and SNES, I've played a couple Genesis, a few Game Boys, several Atari 2600s, a ColecoVision game before I tossed the crummy emulator off my computer for good (the Coleco emulators had terrible GUIs), and recently I even played a couple N64 games. The one system that will forever be linked to roms in my mind, however, is the Commodore 64.

In 1998 or '99 during a vacation, I was in our trailer alone playing on our C64. A storm broke out, but I have a tendency to dismiss them when I think they're not serious. This was a mistake. The storm got much worst, and destroyed the C64. It wasn't till several years later till I found out that the power supply was destroyed, which in turn burnt out a few chips on the C64. This left us without a C64 for several years and I always hated myself for ruining our system.

So in 2000, when I first found a website with tons of C64 games, I was excited. I skipped a lecture that day just playing games I haven't played for a while. The old c64.com will be a site that I'll remember for a long time.

Now at the time I was in college trying to get a degree in computer science, but I knew very little about the rom files. I soon learned that these cracked programs were often bundled with little programs made by the hackers. I used to be pissed off about how the hackers were adding their own content to the games, but after a while I realized how silly these demos were.

After seeing a few demos, you eventually see patterns. Many were made in the late 80s when the C64 was a top selling computer. Tons of these guys seem to be from Europe. Scrolling text is always used, and boasting is popular. These nerds were really competitive, as they're constantly listing their own accomplishments while putting down other hacking groups. Sometimes there's harsh language. With all this there's usually a background song that's sorta catchy but ultimately forgettable.

One of the things I wanted to do when I finally started a blog was poke fun at these. I'm sure if I took a look at a few of these, (and there is a TON of them, even if you just count the stand-alone demos), I could find something amusing to say. Heck, I could just transcribe a few and we could all laugh at how silly these things are. The snarky method vs the transcribe method isn't an easy decision. I guess I'll figure it out once I find a great demo to start on.