Atari Bytes

In 1982, Data Age had a video game concept meeting. "We need a new idea, people," the team leader said. "We gotta get this one out by the end of the day." It was 4:45 p.m. The office closed at 5:00 It was also Friday. In desperation, someone grabbed a marker and scrawled "SPACE BUGS" across the large flip chart, knocking the easel to the floor.  Ernie sat at the computer. He wasn't the best programmer, but was the fastest typist. He banged out some code that would have pink centipedes type things and some other cylindrical bug with antennae crawl slowly across the entire upper half of the screen. It wasn't really clear what they were doing, but you could shoot them. "Good enough?" Ernie said. "YES," the rest of the team said in unison and fled out of the building into the five o'clock world where no owned a piece of their time. And, thus, BUGS, the game at the heart of episode 172, was born. Is this a bad game? Well, can one dung beetle drag 1,141 times its weight? This week's story is...BUGS: A POEM Thanks t