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Blast from the Past

Nerdarchy > Blast from the Past (Page 4)

Blast from the Past: The Book of Swords Series

The man behind the books

Fred Saberhagen

Author Fred Saberhagen. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Author Fred Saberhagen (1930-2007) must have been a busy person. Not only was he the creator of the Berserker series of science fiction tales, the Dracula sequence of novels, the Books of the Gods series, and a number of video games, but he was also the man responsible for The Book of Swords series which consisted of 11 novels. He even wrote another trilogy, collectively known as Empire of the East, which was vaguely related to The Book of Swords due to the events happening in the same world as The Book of Swords but thousands of years earlier.

Blast from the Past: Adventure video game for Atari 2600

[caption id="attachment_15672" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] "Adventure" for the Atari 2600. It looks simple, and was, but it still provided plenty of fun.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_15669" align="alignright" width="235"] The original box for the "Adventure" video game. The Atari 2600 cartridge came inside.[/caption] There was a time when video games were...

Blast from the Past: Dungeons & Dragons Tomb of Horrors

[caption id="attachment_13611" align="alignright" width="340"] 1978's Tomb of Horrors[/caption] [caption id="attachment_13613" align="alignright" width="336"] 1981's Tomb of Horrors[/caption] Few words raise the ire of long-time Dungeons & Dragons aficionados more than “Tomb of Horrors.” The words “Fourth edition” come to mind, but that’s fairly recent and probably somewhat unfair...

Blast from the Past — Dr. Strange TV Movie

Everybody knows Marvel is releasing a Dr. Strange movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch next month, but did you know there was a Dr. Strange movie for television way back in 1978? It’s true. Peter Hooten starred as Dr. Strange, looking more than a little like Gabe Kaplan in the TV show Welcome Back, Kotter. Also, Hooten’s costume was more than a little goofy looking, at one point sporting a giant star and at another showing ancient Egyptian iconography, but it was the 1970s, so what could you expect? Just don’t get me started on that faux silky cape.

Blast from the Past: Dungeons & Dragons Animated Series

blast from the past dungeons & dragons animated

The first 9 episodes only cost me 99 cents. May you be so lucky, if you choose.

1983 was a big year for me. Over the summer I turned 14, and in the fall I would begin ninth grade, kicking off my high school years as a freshman. But more importantly, it was a big year for my role-playing habits.

TSR’s sci-fi game Star Frontiers had been out for a year and was coming out with new products left and right. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was riding high with a ton of new modules, including the original Ravenloft module (the maps!), and even the D&D Basic Set was getting a slight reworking with a new boxed set. Then towards the end of the year there hints of something major coming from TSR in 1984, and eventually that would be known as Dragonlance.

So, 1983 had a lot happening in the worlds of D&D. But perhaps the most noticeable, at least for the 13-soon-14-year-old me was the Dungeons & Dragons animated TV series.

blast from the past dungeons & dragons animated

Our heroes. Yep, that’s Bobby the Barbarian at center.

Saturday morning cartoons were a huge deal then, and TSR big shot Gary Gygax had pulled off the unthinkable when he traveled to Hollywood and got Marvel Productions (yes, of the comic book Marvel company) and Teoi Animation of Japan involved with this new animated show.

Blast from the Past: Mattel Electronics Handheld Games

Blast from the Past: Mattel Electronics Handheld Games
mattel
You see a kid walking down the street. His eyes are glued to the game in his hands, so he barely notices when he strolls across a busy street, and he doesn’t hear tires squeal and horns blare. Could he be playing Pokemon Go? Or is he doing something else on his smart phone?

Of course not. The year is 1976, after all.

How can that be? Believe it or not, way back in the dinosaur ages we actually had electronic handheld games, and they were quite popular. Sports games were probably the most common, but plenty of others were available. Companies like Coleco and Sears (yes, that Sears) had plenty of games available, and it seemed more came out every year, especially at Christmas.

But of all the companies which sold such devices, by far the most popular had to be Mattel Electronics. 14081202_10211248513267847_944445570_nThis company kicked everything off with the very first all-digital electronic game, Auto Race, which came out in stores in 1976.

By today’s standards, Auto Race was a simple game with red LED (light-emitting diode) lights. The player controlled a bright red line one the bottom of the tiny screen. The goal was to steer your race car (that red line) from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen four times before a time of 99 seconds ran out. If the player made it, then the player won the game. The hard part was avoiding all the other race cars (more red blips) which came at you at high speeds, and if one hit you, then your car was forced back to the bottom of the screen. The main control moved your car from left to right, but you could also change gears to speed up or slow down play.

Blast from the Past: Godzilla vs. Megalon

Blast from the Past: Godzilla vs. Megalon13942695_10211113762699167_27537422_n

My dad put up with a lot from me when I was a kid in the ’70s. It’s not that I was a bad kid, but he was more of a Roy Rogers and Lone Ranger kind of guy while I kept wanting Star Trek and Star Wars toys between dragging him to science fiction and horror movies.

 

 

In the summer of 1976, when I turned seven, I made him take me to yet another film I’m sure he did not want to see. We parked downtown and walked the distance to the only local theater that showed foreign films.

I don’t remember what it was that drew me to his movie. Perhaps I had heard of the main character, or maybe I had been mesmerized by the newspaper advertisement artwork which showed two giant monsters battling it out atop the World Trade Center towers (a scene which is nowhere to be found in the movie).Megalon

I’m talking about the epic Godzilla vs. Megalon, originally released in Japan in 1973 though it didn’t make it to the U.S. until 1976.

This is not everyone’s favorite Godzilla movie. In fact, it tends to be one of the lower rated of the big guy’s series of films, but for the seven-year-old me, it was simply awesome. See, this was my first Godzilla experience, and I would be something of a fan for the rest of my life.

And what wasn’t to like? First off, you’ve got the big guy himself, Godzilla, leading a monster-packed story with the likes of Gigan, a beaked and hooked horror; Jet Jaguar, a robot who can perform martial arts and change size (and looking vaguely like a later generation’s Power Rangers); and the other star of the title, Megalon, a giant bug-like monster with a star-shaped spike sticking out of its head and some kind of earth-digging drills in place of hands or claws. Even Anguirus makes an appearance, a somewhat rare site, with his dinosaur-like body with armored plates and spikes sticking out everywhere, along with Rodan, a flying, dragon-like beast.

Blast from the Past: Star Frontiers

[caption id="attachment_11744" align="aligncenter" width="776"] My original Star Frontiers: Alpha Dawn books and maps.[/caption] A little history [caption id="attachment_11746" align="alignright" width="320"] The original Star Frontiers Referee's Screen.[/caption] In the early 1980s, the world seemed suddenly crazed for everything science fiction, especially space opera. Star Wars had been around for...

Blast from the Past — Transformers: The Movie

With the live action Transformers movies of the last decade it can be easy for some fans to forget the franchise was originally a cartoon series back in the 1980s, a series based upon a line of toys produced by Hasbro. Also, some fans might be too young to know about the old cartoons, and they might have missed the spectacle that was Transformers: The Movie from 1986.

Blast from the Past: Spaceward Ho!

ho screenshot

This screen shot of a game of Spaceward Ho! looks rather busy, but don’t let that fool you. This is a relatively simple game.

Imagine you are in charge of an alien race that must expand across the galaxy. You send out spaceships to find new planets, then you have to rework those planets so they can support your species. Along the way you strive to increase population levels and to raise funds to keep expansion rolling. Then the worst happens and you run smack into another alien race doing the same as you. It’s war! And intergalactic war at that. All with ships that look like flying sharks, planets that wear cowboy hats, and special events that happen on holidays.

I’m talking about Spaceward Ho!, a computer video game that was first released in 1990 by Delta Tao Software. Originally created for Macintosh computers, this strategy game has earned its fair share of praise and a number of awards, and it was inducted into the MacWorld Game Hall of Fame. The game proved so popular it was reviewed not once, but twice in Dragon magazine, in issues 196 and 202. Even Wil Wheaton back in 2013 tweeted about his excitement when Spaceward Ho! became available for Android through GooglePlay.

Spaceward Ho! alive and kicking