For Christmas, I Bought Myself a Memory

For Christmas this year, I bought myself a memory.

The unique thing about memories is that they are, well, unique. No two people share the exact same memories. I remember the year our family got an Atari 2600 and I remember playing games Christmas morning with my dad. Although the two of us were there togethes, I am sure his memories of that morning differ from mine. All of our memories are affected by our personal experiences, perspective, and context.

So if all of our memories are unique, how can you buy one? In my life I’ve learned there are two types of people: those who associate memories with physical objects and those who don’t. I’ve also learned that those two groups will never understand one other. For the record I am a member of the former group. My room, my garage, and my life are filled with posessopms that exist only to remind me of events and people from my life. Sitting not far from me on my desk is a name plaque that belonged to a coworker who passed away several years ago. While I would not say he has been forgotten, he is also not actively remembered by most. For me, he is remembered every single time I see that plaque. Every time I look at it, I remember a funny thing he said or did or a good time we had together. I’m sure in your past you have had also had a coworker or acquaintance pass away. Maybe you’re the type of person who randomly thinks about them without having to be reminded, but I am not. The things in my home and in my life keep memories alive. I quite literally have items on display in my home office that I owned when I was five years old. Not everything, of course; it is definitely not a one-to-one relationship between all these things and my memories. Sometimes a simple item can remind me of an entire friendship or an entire era. Getting rid of these things feels like getting rid of the memories. Maybe you’re not this way. Like I said, there are two types of people and I don’t expect everyone can relate.

In seventh grade, I met one of my best friends. His name was Jeff. The first time I visited Jeff’s house I discovered he owned a Commodore 64 computer. I was enamored with the Commodore 64 for multiple reasons, one of which was that it had the best graphics and played more games than any other 8-bit computer. My friend Andy’s family owned a Commodore as did our neighbors across the street. We owned multiple computers at that time in 1985 including an Apple II, an IBM XT, and a PCjr, but we did not have a Commodore 64. And not only did Jeff own one, but it lived on a desk in his bedroom. Without bothering his parents, without asking for permission, he could roll out of bed, walk just a few feet, and play games like Ghostbusters, Archon, Impossible Mission, and any number of classic games. I used this knowledge as leverage with my parents, and for my birthday that year I got my own Commodore 64 in my own bedroom, just like Jeff’s.

That same year, my parents opened a computer software store. The store existed in a very brief window in time when stores dedicated to selling computer software existed. When the store opened, people did not see the need for a dedicated store that sold boxes of blank floppy disks, computer games, tractor-fed printer paper,and joysticks. The store was open for approximately one year and closed when mammoths like Walmart and Target began selling the same inventory. There was no way my parents could compete with their prices. My dad once told me it was cheaper for him to buy computer software from Walmart than through resale distributors.

While the store was open we had a few loyal customers, one of whom was Jeff -- or, more specifically, Jeff’s mother. Jeff and his mother would visit the store and he was allowed to buy games there from time to time. In the spring, one of those games he purchased was the original Bard’s Tale, released by Electronic Arts. I don’t remember the exact time, but it seems like he bought it shortly before summer vacation began, at the end of seventh grade.

I’d had best best friends prior to meeting Jeff. Another one of my best friends, Andy, lived on my street. In the mornings, I would ride my bike over to Andy’s house and, often while accompanied with other kids from the neighborhood, would ride our bikes around the block or play in the creek or climb trees or build fake rocket ships out of cardboard boxes. We built bicycle ramps using wood stole from construction sites and nails pulled out of fence panels. But at the end of the day, all of us went home for supper. With Jeff, it was different. Jeff lived a few miles away from me and so I began spending the night at his house frequently. Sometimes on Fridays I would ride home with him after school, spend the night, and have my parents pick me up on Saturday. Sometimes I would stay all day Saturday too and have my parents pick me up on Sunday. I remember one time my mom specifically complaining that I was spending more time at Jeff’s house than at our house. One of the things Jeff and I spent all of our time doing was playing computer games.

In the summer of 1986, Jeff and I spent essentially three months playing Bard’s Tale. To us, Bard’s Tale seemed like a direct conversion of Dungeons & Dragons, off the paper and into the computer. Once the game loaded we were dropped into a three-dimensional world full of color and music and animated enemies. The picture of each enemy moved! Fighters waved their swords in the air amnd wizards confured fireballs right before our eyes. Each character only had a few frames of animation, but to us it was like Dungeons & Dragons had come to life. We spent hours (if not days) creating our characters, assembling our party, and heading out into the town of Skara Brae where we fought enemies, explored dungeons, drew maps, discovered treasure, and earned experience points. I’m not exaggerating when I say we must have played Bard’s Tale every single day of the entire summer.

Jeff was more of a night owl than I was. He would often stay up until six or seven in the morning. I was not wired that way back then. By ten or eleven p.m., I would fall asleep, but I would wake up at the crack of dawn. Between the two of us, we developed a system. We would play Bard’s Tale all day, and when it was time for bed I would go to sleep and Jeff would continue playing. When I woke up the following morning, he would still be playing the game. He would tell me where we were, what was happening, and where I should explore, and then he would go to bed and I would take over. Commodore computers were known for overheating and we had to buy additional fans just to keep the computer cool so that we could play for days on end. This was at a time when there were no save states, and saving your progress in the middle of an adventure was often difficult. All it took was a single power outage or power supply overheating to ruin an entire day’s worth of treasure hunting.

For someone who has played so many video games in their life, there are so few that I’ve actually completed. With the magic of YouTube, I have watched people beat some old games in 10 or 15 minutes that I literally spent 30 years playing and never beat. I didn’t know that so many games had endings to be honest! But a role-playing game like Bard’s Tale obviously had an ending. You were given a task, and eventually you would beat the big baddie at the end of the game and you would win. And eventually, we did just that. The two of us played Bard’s Tale for the entire summer and right around the time it was time to go back to school, we finally finished the game.

Jeff and I remained friends throughout not just school but our lives. In high school we dated girls who were friends. Jeff was a groomsman at my wedding. Last month, I attended his son’s wedding.

Last week on eBay I purchased a copy of Bard’s Tale. It’s not even the Commodore 64 version. I think it’s the IBM PC version, but the box and packaging are identical. I don’t even know if the disk works, and to be honest I don’t care. In a way, it’s like Schrödinger’s floppy disk. As long as I don’t test it, it probably works, or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, I’ll never play it. I put the box up on display on a shelf next to my little retro gaming nook. I will never play this copy of Bard’s Tale. In fact, I may never play Bard’s Tale again. It was a great game in the 1980s, but modern interfaces have made those old games difficult, if not impossible, to revisit. Things like auto-mapping and auto-saving have really spoiled modern gamers.

But the point was never whether or not the game worked. I bought it for the package. I bought it so that it can sit next to my Commodore 64 setup in my home office, and every time I go over there, I will look at that box and think about all the time I spent playing games with Jeff. I will think about all the times we spent together playing Bard’s Tale, and I will think about all the great fun I had on a Commodore 64 back in the ‘80s. I will think about all those things whether or not I even turn my own computer on. That’s why I bought this box. I didn’t buy it for the game itself. I bought it for the memories.