My brother and I were raised by a single mom. Getting our first computer (my first computer, as my brother wasn't interested) - a Commodore 64 - was a watershed

My brother and I were raised by a single mom. Getting our first computer (my first computer, as my brother wasn't interested) - a Commodore 64 - was a watershed moment. I couldn't believe it the day my mom got it and brought it home. This was when it's prices were getting slashed to prices should could kind of afford (approximately 1984-85). I pulled it out of the box after nearly breaking her neck with hugs and put it all together, hooking it up with to a massive, very pale and low contrast wooden cabinet color TV. And then it dawned on me. I had no way to play any games! I actually needed a disk drive (something that nearly cost as much as the compute itself!). For the first couple of weeks, I entered lines of BASIC I either read in the manual or from the back of magazines. When we finally got the drive, I could feel the surge of power! This would have been 9th grade - my last year of middle school where I went to school. I remember grousing about it during math class that I finally had all this gear and no money to buy the games for it. A guy ahead of me turned around and said he could bring me a stack of disks tomorrow. We became solid best friends. That dude had a modem and was able to pull down "free" games from his telephone line all night long. It was the darkest, most seductive black magic I'd ever heard of. I remember getting a copy of Top Gun before it was even available for retail. Crap game, but I thought it was something magical at the time. The floppy disk was a life changer. --- For what it's worth, Lode Runner was one of my favorite games as a kid. And it was one of the few my brother really liked, too. In fact, he was better at solving the puzzles than I was. I have multiple versions of the game for C64 to this very day, including a boxed cart. I love Lode Runner. Great article - thanks for posting it.