200 “SYS 64738”

Time to explain this comic. The jokes were already way too old when I did this in 2003, nineteen years have probably made everything in this strip forgotten. Like most ARPA-01 strips, everything refers to Commodore 64 games. It’s tough to think this, but at some point soon everyone who will have owned a C64 while it was the latest thing will soon be dead so it’s important that I explain this for future generations who did not have to load everything with a cassette deck.

In the first panel, it is referring to an old Commodore 64 game called “Sex Games”. In that game, there were five levels: four of them with a woman in one sexual position, and the final one was a five person gangbang with only one woman. You had to wiggle the joystick to match the motions to get to orgasm and go on to the next level. The graphics were awful, but, hey, this was 1985.

In the second panel, it is referring to a program called ELIZA which was written in the 1960s but eventually ported onto the C64. At the time, it was an amusing program that would try to “talk to you” by finding key words in your output and reflecting them back to you. To get the dialogue correct, I played with an online version a bit to get some interesting responses to use.

In the third panel, it’s referring to ZORK I, an excellent Infocom game that I loved playing. Even now the imagination behind these games is still second to none, and I spent many an hour playing them again and again. I think this panel is the only time a young girl appears in the comic; because of the nature of the comic I purposely made sure young people didn’t appear unless they had absolutely no sexual role in the comic.

In the last panel, I made a deliberate flub. Commodore 64 generally used 5 1/4 floppies, not 3 1/2, but 3 1/2 is funnier so I went with that.