Aztec cracks me up, Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered on June 12, 1981, and the Apple II copy of Aztec that I have displays “1982” on the title screen. It may be impossible to know how development went, so I’ll imagine the creator of Aztec rushing home after watching Indiana Jones STEP ASIDE THROWIN ELBOWS WE MUST PROTECT THE BRIEFCASE to get this game made, as the title screen very clearly invokes the iconic scene of Indy attempting to obtain a Golden Idol. Maybe it was really easy to make a graphic like the one below for Apple II computers; there is no way it was easy to make a graphic like that for Apple II computers.
A lot of stuff hadn’t exactly been ironed out yet when Aztec was created – I have seen this with other Apple // games, but you need to pick menu prompts with capital letters, so go ahead and put Caps Lock on. There is no joystick support, so get ready for the gauntlet: W is walk, R is run, J is jump, A is turn left, D is turn right: this is most easily described as an action or arcade-style game. You get a lot of “verbs,” all keyboard-controlled, though. There is a fight mode with a different set of commands to strike, draw gun and shoot. Movement is different in fight mode!
I first played Aztec in elementary school. Before we had a computer at home, I’d dream of the little moments I could play games on an Apple, Atari 8-bit or Commodore 64. Anywhere. My friend Joe had an Apple and this game for it. Being little kids with imaginations made most games seem deeper than they were, but as an adult I see now that Aztec actually did have the command set of a deep game. Something I have learned over the course of this project is that there is a reason the developers of these games did the things they did – since there is no joystick support, the Apple’s keyboard is in play, which means there is more you can do.
I recall obtaining a blank floppy (a box of blanks was simply preposterous at that time for me) and I knew that games could be copied. I asked Joe if he could ask his older brother to copy the game for me, so that even if I didn’t have an Apple computer (and I didn’t get this particular one until I was about 40) I would at least have a copy of the game. After a couple of weeks, Joe brought my blank floppy disk back to school. He said that his older brother could not copy Aztec, because of a flaw on the floppy disk.
Wanting to describe them correctly, 5.25″ floppy disks have a round, flexible disk that is where the data is kept, and a jacket that makes the item rectangular. If you look at the back of the jacket, you can see that it is just folder over, like a competent person might do for wrapping a present. A little piece of the jacket on the floppy disk I intended to contain Aztec had started to become unglued, and had pulled away a little from itself. That was the explanation that my friend gave me. The disk, where it was glued, was faulty. It didn’t sound right at the time, and of course, that was not the reason why – most likely his brother didn’t know how to copy it, or didn’t get around to doing it. But that’s the kind of stuff that sticks with you. I warezed so many games when we got our XT and beyond, so many games were warezed coming into the house and then going out. Like I never wanted what happened to me to happen to anyone else.
Too embarrassed to ever contact my friend again, I eventually got an Apple //c, and then a //e and started Aztec. Nostalgia aside, and Aztec is one of the games I have the most nostalgia for, this thing holds up. Placing explosives and digging through trash has never been more fun. It lives and breathes, too. One of the situations I find myself in while replaying these games for the posts is that I’ll have the game kind of running on its own while typing my thoughts up. Aztec has some areas where you can pretty much hide out. The game world is fluid, however, and that was made very clear when after a minute or so a frigging dinosaur came wandering in from the left side of the screen. It didn’t seem to notice or locate my guy sitting still (vision based on movement?) but how terrifying. For an old game. For any game! I have said that Zork is the first great game to ever be created because it is the kind of thing I feel I can say, but Aztec bringing what it does to the table in 1982 is right up there.