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Sargon II on the VIC-20
When Eight Kilobytes Would Sit Down and Play
Enzo Lombardi15 min read·3 days ago--
In 1769, Wolfgang von Kempelen wheeled a wooden cabinet into the court of Empress Maria Theresa and announced that it could play chess. The Mechanical Turk did, famously, beat Napoleon. It also turned out to have a man hiding inside.
For about two centuries after that, the dream of a real chess-playing machine, no human stuffed in the bottom, sat just out of reach. Then, sometime around 1982, that dream arrived at my house in a beige plastic cartridge. It cost a fraction of a clarinet lesson. It plugged into the expansion port of my VIC-20. And it would, on a good day, beat me.
This is a love letter to that cartridge.
The longing
If you grew up in the early eighties and you liked chess, you had a very specific problem: you needed an opponent. Not occasionally. Constantly. Chess is a game you have to play to get better at, and the supply of patient human opponents in a small town was, statistically speaking, zero.
The chess club was an hour by bus, on Wednesdays, and the youngest member was fifty-three. Friends would humour you for one game and then ask if you wanted to do something normal. Parents had jobs. Siblings had opinions about your hobbies.
