Christmas, it’s that wonderful time of year. The year is slowly winding down and the holiday season is upon us. 2021 has for most been a challenging year thanks to the Coronavirus. Nonetheless, Christmas time is all about having a great and joyful time with family and the people we love. So let’s put the darn virus on the backburner for a few days and have fun. Last Christmas, I opted for the obvious and wrote a small article on Capstone’s two Home Alone titles, based upon the first two Home Alone movies. This year I wanted to do the opposite and dug out a few oddities from the mid-’80s.

Productivity software was a sure winner in the mid-’80s. Brøderbund had heralded it into the mainstream only years earlier and was for the next many years the go-to company for anything and everything productivity-related.

What better time than Christmas, doing animated cards with music or even cards to be printed for family and friends. This was exactly what Thoughtware and Hi-Tech Expressions’ Jingle Disk delivered. When you were all done you could load up Random House’s Ho! Ho! Ho!, five simple Christmas games for the Apple II and Commodore 64 that could be enjoyed with the family

Thanks to the many thousands of people who have visited my blog this year. Many of you have reached out to me with questions or additional information and thank you so much for that, I really do appreciate it. I started out writing over 10 years ago but it wasn’t until a few years ago I was confident enough to start making it available on my blog. My focus has always been to convey the story each game tells, for anyone with an interest, hopefully, that also includes the younger generations who find the history, the developers, the times, and the technology fascinating. The venture has indeed been great for me, learning something with every article.

This has been a busy year with work, family, and life in general but I’ve still somehow managed to write and post nearly 50 articles, some definitely better than others.
While I have played or at least tried out the majority of the games I write about, this year I decided to record some of the gameplay, all of which can be found on my humble Youtube channel.

I won’t lie, the constant pressure to deliver and maintain momentum has somewhat burned me out. Some of the longer articles, with research, writing, taking photos, retouching, recording gameplay, etc.. can eat up as much as 40-50 hours, or even more. Everything is done on a hobby basis and it’s starting to take its toll and affecting all the other things I like to do in life.
In an earlier post, I briefly mentioned that some of the upcoming articles will be Quick Bits, articles just showing off items with a brief description, along with some gameplay footage. I still have a couple of thousand games in the collection I would like to touch on and hopefully doing some as Quick Bits will make it all plausible.
Anyway enough jabbering.

Merry Christmas everyone and a happy New Year and again, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for visiting