ABSTRACT
By 1979, desktop computers like the Apple II and Commodore VIC-20 were appearing in schools and businesses, and, on a smaller scale, on kitchen tables and in family dens. Not only did the people have ones at school, but up in the master bedroom's office area, the author could go up and figure out how to program in BASIC. Like most budding game programmers, McCord started small, creating adaptations of simple games like tic-tac-toe. McCord put the VIC-20 version of Sword of Fargoal to bed and turned his attention toward the Commodore 64. McCord convinced Epyx to bring them on so they could help him write Sword of Fargoal for the Commodore 64. By loading the game into memory, players could freeze the program's execution, PEEK into memory to find the locations of values such as their character's life, strength, and gold, and POKE in new values that transformed their lowly avatars into god-like conquerors. .
