Before PC's became ubiquitous there were several pretenders to the
throne and my dad bought a couple of them. I mentioned the TRS80 and
we had a Commodore 64 but my favorite computer before we got an IBM
compatible box was the Atari 520ST. The 520 was Atari's foray into
home computing but I loved it for one reason and that was a game
called Mouse Trap. I had actually gone to the mall with my mom for
my birthday and went to the computer store their that had a whole
wall of Games for the system and I read over the boxes and
scrutinized the pictures for a long time because at 20 dollars I knew
that there were not going too be many if any more games so I had to
choose wisely. Mouse Trap was a single screen platformer with fifty
levels and fun themes and no continues and no extra lives. It was
brutal, as most games used to be. I would get a good start and be
deep in the twenties when I would make a mistake and lose two lives
on one level and know I didn't even have a chance as the levels got
harder. They got much much harder. Every play-through I could push a
little further into the unknown and discover a new level which may
cost me all of my remaining lives and require an hour of replay to
get back to. I played like a boy possessed and even took the game
disk over to a friend house who had a 520 as well to continue
playing because my mom had kicked me out of the house and told me to
go play somewhere else. I think she meant out in the sunshine but I
did literally what she asked. This would be the part where I told you
I persevered and got to see the end screen and finally learn the
reason for the mouse's quest but the levels got too hard for me in
the middle forties and I eventually lost interest and gave up. The
520 went the way of all of the non-PCs and other games would come and
go but that was the first one that I loved because it was mine.
