Game of the Week: Qix

 

Qix was an old Atari video game from the 1980s, later adapted to arcade game format...at least that's the way I remember it.  After Pong of the late 1970s, it became my favorite computer game...all because my brother-in-law Keith had left it with Melissa and me after we married in 1986.  When I applied to the Postal Service in late 1986 for a clerk position with their new letter-sorting machine (LSM), I realized after taking the exam that I would need to practice my dexterity with the keyboard.  Qix was played on the Atari (attachable through cables to the back of any TV then) as a small cartridge you jam into the top of the console...this computer also had the Basic computer language built into it, so I was able to program it to throw iterations of random number chains on the screen at time intervals roughly emulating the procession of letters with their addresses on the LSM...in the summer of '87 this greatly helped me gain that manual dexterity required for the job I was hired for in late September that year.  But when I wasn't training for my job on the Atari, I enjoyed playing Qix...and I got pretty doggone good at it!  The game's object is to draw Etch-a-Sketch-like lines enclosing spaces on the screen's rectangular grid, trying to avoid the randomly-moving Qix in the process while amassing as high a score as possible: should Qix cut through a line in progress the game is over! In the arcade game version above, the player is going up on the left part of the screen, trying to connect to another side before that fluctuating pattern on the right can hit it.  And time is of the essence: another icon, Sparx, moves along the lines already drawn and can end the game if it ever catches up with the player.  Over the course of time I developed some pretty nifty strategies for victory, but I don't even know if we still have the game or that ancient console: too bad, I feel a sentimental attachment to it all...