Games on mobile phones were barely a thing, and most teenagers didn’t even have phones anyway. JAMES PARKINSON: These were the days of dial-up internet. It's graphically rich, even though it's on a monochrome, you know, non-backlit screen, but it has got gravity effects, and the controls are just about perfect. Just the way it works, it's very fluid, it was very efficient in the way that it was written. In fact, to this day, my very favourite version of Tetris is actually a clone called Q for the TI-89.
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I mean, you can tell sometimes, games were ones that just barely worked, you know, someone was still learning how to write programs for the calculator, and they managed to get this thing put together, and it was a little rough around the edges, but it worked. And the level of skill that you would see, on a game-to-game basis, was really interesting as well. And then there were other ones that were usually the more advanced style, you know, more graphics heavy, that sort of thing. But there were also entirely original games.ĬOLIN WIRTH: You would occasionally come across like a really cool, even just text-based adventure game that was completely original, you can tell someone had just sat down one day and decided to write it. The kind of handheld games you’d typically find on the Nintendo Game Boy, like Tetris or Super Mario. JAMES PARKINSON: Many of these games were clones of existing titles. I don't think anyone really knew where all of the new games were coming from. And that's kind of the way it was for me for at least the first couple years. And likewise, if you were talking about a game with someone else, and they didn't have it, you could send a copy that you had to them, just using that little cable. At least here in the US, in high school, the vast majority of the time - and this was in the, kind of, mid to late 90s - it was all kind of a sneaker-net type of thing, right? Where you had just other people that you eventually learned, you know, “Oh, they've got games on their calculator”, and you'd use the little link cable to hook up to theirs, and then they could send them to you. And this experience of how people first learned about calculator games, and went on a mission to try and get them was a common story, because it was sort of an underground thing.ĬOLIN WIRTH: The TI-83, I think, was kind of the new, you know, hot model that everyone in school had at the time. JAMES PARKINSON: We’re talking about the graphing calculator, specifically the models made by Texas Instruments, which were a requirement in a lot of schools. And let me just say it made math class go by a lot faster for me. I tried to absorb as much knowledge as I could, at least from, kind of, a consumer standpoint, about, “What's this all about?”, like, “How do I get into this more?”, “Where do I find these games?”, “What are they capable of?”. But he kind of showed me, “Yeah, you know, I got them from somebody else, and they sent the games over to my calculator, and now I can play them”. Like, he wasn't an expert in it, or anything, by any means. JAMES PARKINSON: That’s Colin Wirth from the YouTube channel This Does Not Compute.ĬOLIN WIRTH: You know, and he kind of kind of explained, “Yeah, I mean, you can get games for these”, I guess.
And I'm like, “Well, you know, that doesn't look like they're doing calculations or whatever, because they're using kind of the D-pad an awful lot.” And after class, I'm like, “What were you doing?” And he shows me that he's got Tetris running on his calculator, and my eyes get really big, and I'm like, “No way, how do you - tell me more, how do you do this?” But it turns out it was possible, and it went far beyond my own school.ĬOLIN WIRTH: I had seen from a classmate, them kind of noodling around on their calculator quite a bit during class one time. Now, I’d never seen anyone playing a calculator game, and I had no idea how to get one.
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JAMES PARKINSON: When I was in high school in the early 2000s there was this idea, this myth, that you could download a game for your calculator. You could actually use them to play games, if you knew how to get ahold of them. But these calculators, like the TI-83 model, were capable of far more than equations and graphs. It was probably made by Texas Instruments and your parents complained that it cost too much. If you were a high school student in the 90s or early 2000s, you were likely required to have a graphing calculator for math class.
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