Remember Space Invaders?

(Probably if you were born before 1975 or so)

Destroy the Invaders Below With a Click:

The Original Space Invaders Game!

(Almost)

1) 20 years ago in the '80s when hardly anyone had a PC they played games like this on machines like Atari which used your TV set as a monitor.  Like now, there were all different competing game machines with proprietary formats, Atari seemed like the Microsoft of the time to me, so I went for it.                            

2) I barely had enough money to buy the Atari machine, about $100.00.  Tried to get a Sears card to buy it, but was rejected for too low an annual income.  I finally bought it on sale for cash in Pathmark and got a few cartridges at around $20.00 each  

3) Though I am not a gamer now and wasn't much of one then, I wasted months of my life playing this game (and a couple of other cartridges that I was lucky enough to have for hours on end.  I'd break open a six-pack and keep trying to kill these menaces appearing from the top of my TV screen

4) The Atari still sits in the garage.  Haven't touched it in years.  Didn't know diddly about computers then, couldn't have told you the difference between BASIC and a memory chip, but this was a whole new fascinating technology that I could install right in our modest 5th. floor walkup tenament in NYC and pretend I was in another world.   I was around 25 years old then.  Sad...

5) Well, if you were around then and long for simpler times, a fellow named James Eibisch was kind enough to develop a freeware version of Space Invaders in QBASIC which you can download here and run on your PC (not your Atari machine, if you're lucky (stupid) enough to still be holding onto it.