"So we stood up there for a long while, watching the sunset and discussing how it was one of those things you could never truly capture in 8-bit, not with the 64's simplistic definition of violet (CHR$(156)), orange (CHR$(129)), and yellow (CHR$(158)). There were too many other colors, thousands of colors. The hardware could never do it justice."
Sometimes you get so into a book that you read it obsessively and finish it in just two sittings. That was The Impossible Fortress. The first novel by Jason Rekulak, The Impossible Fortress is the story of two 14-year-old computer geeks in a small New Jersey town in 1987.
Life was fine for Billy. He had a mother who loved him and left him home alone at night, giving him lots of freedom. He had his two best friends, Alf and Clark. He had his beloved Commodore 64 computer. All of that changes one day when Alf shows up with news...Vanna White is on the cover of Playboy. The boys have a new mission in life. Get a copy of that magazine from Zelinsky's newsstand.
Billy is good with computers. Really good. He creates his own games and dreams of the day when he will own his own company. This is a dream that he keeps to himself until he meets Mary Zelinsky, a smart girl with a love for computers as well. His friends want him to use Mary to get the Playboy from her father's store, but Billy is more excited to have finally met someone as into computer programming as he is. Mary challenges Billy and helps him grow as a programmer. Together they work to perfect Billy's game, The Impossible Fortress, in hopes of winning a programming contest.
This was such a sweet story. Being the mother of a boy who loves computer games I immediately had a soft spot for Billy. I really enjoyed his character. He is constantly trying to make everyone happy. Trying to do the right thing while not disappointing anyone and continually finding that that's not always easy. He's also trying to carve out a space for himself in this world. Something we all struggled with at 14.
Being a child of the 80s made this a really fun read. It was a nice little flashback through time. I found myself smiling a lot at things I had forgotten or hadn't thought about in years.
If you go to the author's website https://jasonrekulak.com/ you can play The Impossible Fortress for yourself. I highly suggest you do. It was a lot of fun and made me feel like a kid again, playing video games with my brother and my cousins.
While I was no computer master mind like Will and Mary, I was fortunate enough to be one of the first kids in my town to own a computer. One of my mom's friends was extremely good with computers and hooked us up with one. A massive desk top that you could barely move. He also loaded it with games and taught my brother and I how to run DOS and load them. It wasn't until I got older that I realized we had pirated copies of all of the games we played. He also taught us how to cheat the games. That summer we became obsessed with beating them all, and we did. We'd sit hunched together in front of the computer screen for hours. It was the very first summer we ever stayed home alone while my mom worked, so she didn't mind. It kept us out of trouble.
Once I got older, and computers became more mainstream, I stopped playing so many games and fell in love with digital photography and MP3s I had a world of photos and music right at my fingertips and it was amazing. I then married a computer geek and we are raising a little gamer. At 10-years-old he can already do extraordinary things. I feel very blessed that I've been able to watch computers change so much in my lifetime. This novel was a great reminder of where we started and how far we've come.
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