Is it just me or do the goofy Halloween animals on that alleged costume also appear in the end credits of "Count Duckula"?

Since you brought up BASIC programming in your article: I had much the same experience when I picked up a "Program Your Own Computer Games" book from my elementary school library. Fortunately, I did have a computer, and while those BASIC games were certainly not the type of video games I was used to, it was still pretty neat to have made something.

I ended up doing a lot of fiddling with BASIC, and eventually moved on to QBASIC, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. (Mind you, REAL programmers were using C++ and other languages at this point, but no matter.) I expanded from text games into simple pseudo-graphical games where you had to get from point A to point B while avoiding a "baddie" who took two steps for every one of yours. All the "characters", however, were just letters or symbols from the ANSI character set.

I was quite the youngin', but this became my hobby. I'd bring a notebook with me everywhere and scribble down lines of code while working out a new game idea in my head.

In middle school, our classroom had an ancient Apple IIe. After discovering how to get the sucker into programming mode and learning the quirks of Apple's variant of BASIC, I'd program games in home room and show them off to classmates. Unfortunately, something was wrong with the computer and it wouldn't save to a disk, so I only had 55 minutes per day to make a game and show it to people before it was destroyed forever.

I got pretty fast at it, though, and I continued to work out code ahead of time and write out the longer, more complicated programs on paper to save me time.

One of my home room triumphs was a 2-D fighting game drawn entirely with ASCII characters: a zero for the combatant's head, slashes for the arms and legs (which became dashes when you kicked or punched), and a "|" for the torso. You could throw fireballs (asterisks), too. But the best part was that, in an homage to my love of MK, you could perform a fatality, knocking the other stickman off "the pit" and into a bed of "spikes". It was swell.

I later recreated some of those games in high school on a TI-83 calculator, once I learned that its programming language was a hobbled version of BASIC.

Syd Lexia wrote:

Eventually I found a program called ZZT, which was a graphical programming language that used ASCII characters. It had a set of predefined items for convenience, but you could program your own and do all sorts of clever things. One of the best ones that I played was a fan-made Zelda ZZT that included a working hookshot as one of the items. I made a couple of ones that I was really proud of, but they were lost in the annals of time when the old family Compudyne bit the dust.

OH MY GOD! I loved ZZT!!

I made a million games with that damn thing. Most of mine, too, have been lost forever. Some of my favorites were ZZT recreations of the X-Men arcade game, and my own sequels to it. I also did some collaborative projects with a friend online, which were a lot of fun: "Double WEIRD" and "Triple WEIRD", based on a series of ZZT games he had done before.

I tried to break free of the overhead-view format from time to time, too. I once made a 2-D platform game with a lot of clever object programming. I still have a handful of my games, but not that one.