The Gamer’s Cafe

The Gamer’s Cafe was one of the most famous columns in 80 Micro. It first appeared in the November 1982 issue, near the height of the TRS-80 game market, and ran until April 1984. The Gamer’s Cafe had some similarities to Captain 80, a column written by Bob Liddil that premiered in the first issue of 80 Microcomputing in 1980 and later appeared in 80 U.S. Journal.

With only a few exceptions, the Gamer’s Cafe was written by the fictional character of Rodney Gambicus. Rodney and his friend Winthrop Luzerdraw had decided to travel the country in a Ford Econoline van. They had filled the van with TRS-80 computers and games, including multiple Model I’s, Model III’s, Color Computers, and two Pocket Computers that the Radio Shack dealer threw in as part of the deal. They also had a PMC-80 which they described as a PMC ½. They planned to stop at various locations around the country, put out tables, and let people play TRS-80 games, literally a “Gamer’s Cafe”.

Rodney and Winthrop soon encountered Mad Max, initially described as a “hippie tree planter who hadn’t been out of the woods since 1976, which was when he finally got back from Woodstock.” Max had an affinity for the game Sea Dragon and quickly beat Winthrop’s high score. Mad Max continued traveling in the van after he fell asleep and Rodney didn’t want to wake him.

In the third column, Winthrop attempted to best Max’s high score in Sea Dragon, not knowing that Rodney had spilt Milk of Magnesia on the disk. The horrible bugs that resulted (including the nuclear reactor turning into a smiley face and whistling the tune from “Leave it to Beaver”) led to Winthrop being committed to the Prairie Sunset Rest Home.

Soon after, Max lost the van and computers in a craps game with the head nurse at the rest home. Now penniless, Rodney and Max met up with Mercedes Silver, a 10-year old prodigy who was studying for her Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins Center for Mathematically and Scientifically Precocious Youth. (“Mercedes Silver” was the name of the paint color used for the Model I and III, also known as “Battleship Grey”.) Using her knowledge of mathematics, Mercedes easily won back everything from Nurse Ada Lovelace in a blackjack game. Since she now owned the van and the computers, Mercedes joined Rodney and Max on the road.

From then on, they traveled the country, encountering condo salesmen in Florida (who seemed to resemble the undead), nearly freezing after the van broke down in Utah, and suffering from hunger in Ohio. But by the middle of 1983, it was clear to almost everyone that the TRS-80 games market was declining. Information about new games stopped appearing in the Gamer’s Cafe and observant readers might have noticed that November 1983 was the final time readers were invited to submit their own high scores.

The story arc that capped the Gamer’s Cafe was somewhat sad. As part of her Ph.D. project at Johns Hopkins, Mercedes built the “Mach 4”, an unbelievably powerful supercomputer that was housed underground. (Modern readers might be amused to read that the Mach 4 had a 1 megabyte long operating system and ran at 3 GHz!)

The Mach 4 was so powerful that it somehow affected time, causing the government to initially claim that it violated the SALT treaty. As Rodney described it, “When the microprocessor is crunching data, clocks in the immediate area run backwards”.

The intense work on the project was too much for Mercedes, and she burnt out from the pressure. She lost her incredible programming skills and returned to live with her parents in Baltimore, an otherwise normal child.

The final Gamer’s Cafe column in April 1984, written by Mad Max, finished off the story. After becoming convinced that the Mach 4 itself was evil, Rodney attempted to destroy it using a steel bar. He succeeded but at the cost of becoming permanently lost in a time displacement, “wandering aimlessly through the dark corridors of time”. Mad Max, the only person left, was forced to sell the van and almost all of the computers to pay the fines due because the van had been parked in a no-parking zone.

25 years later, the idea behind the Gamer’s Cafe just sounds odd but the column exemplified the playfulness that was such a characteristic of 80 Micro at the time. The column served as a means for publishers to announce new games and to provide tips and hints for readers. Clever ways were used to integrate real people from the game companies into the fictional story. My favorite example was the time the travelers encountered Jackson Dott, marketing coordinator at Avalon Hill, on an empty desert road outside Las Vegas.

A popular feature in the column was the high score list, eventually known as the Big Board. The high scores of Winthrop, Max, and Rodney started out the Big Board but it soon expanded to include reader scores as well. Reader scores presented a problem in later issues after ways were discovered to hack some games. Many of those games were banned from the Big Board.

For fictional characters, the people of the Gamer’s Cafe were surprisingly prolific. Mad Max wrote one editorial for 80 Micro. Rodney, Max, and Mercedes edited the 80 Micro one line game contest, which was first announced in the Gamer’s Cafe. Several mentions were made about Rodney and Max editing an anthology of games from 80 Micro that, as far as I know, was never published. Mercedes Silver was later used as a house name for the author of the Feedback Loop column after the departure of Terry Kepner.

The name of the real author of the Gamer’s Cafe was never given, although there were a few hints scattered through the columns. I suspect that Winthrop and Max also corresponded to specific people, at least initially, because they actually had scores on the Big Board.

The Gamer’s Cafe was one of my favorite parts of 80 Micro and I was sorry to see it end. I liked this passage written by Mad Max from the final Gamer’s Cafe:

Actually, I didn’t sell all of the computers. I kept the PMC ½. I hooked it up to a car battery, put it on a park bench in the Boston Common, and booted Lunar Lander. When I got to Boylston Street, I turned around for one last look. Dusk was falling on a cold and grey day. Flakes of snow were drifting in the wind. I could still see the PMC’s flickering screen. It cast its ghostly green light across the months, to the time when I first met Rodney and Mercedes. We’d embarked on a heck of a journey together. Now, it was finished.

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