You're probably talking about Aliens! released in January 1980?

- I was introduced to BASIC early on in elementary school on these clunky school-maintained terminals with printed text on paper rolls (no monitor). This would be in the early 1970s.

- In middle school again we had access to the same clunky terminals...this time you could sign up for your own account and create/store BASIC programs of your own making.

- In 1978 I talked my dad into getting me a PET from Mr. Calculator in Town & Country Village. I remember it was $795 and the wait time was insanely long due to high demand. After looking over materials for the PET and the TRS-80 I decided on the PET because I thought the graphic characters looked pretty cool.

- I acquired a 3rd party game...Seawolf I think it was...and being written entirely in machine language really impressed me. My curiosity led me to purchase the CMOS 6502 reference manual listing all the various commands and status flags used by the processor.

- If memory serves, probably I wrote the game first in BASIC, and then replaced parts of BASIC with machine language (using SYS calls) until eventually the entire game was in ML. To do this I used the monitor program available on cassette tape that allowed you to enter hex codes directly into memory. Coding this way would be seen as insane by today's standards but heck I was still in high school and went with the tools and knowledge I had.

- I submitted the game to Cursor Magazine in 1979, and I think got a check for $135.

Mike