Best Apple II Game
For the purposes of my computer game commentary I refer to the Apple 2 of 1977 as a Western home computer game machine.
Apple Inc. of the U.S.A. released the Apple II personal computer in June of 1977. Upon its release the 4K Apple II retailed for US$1300 and the 48K Apple II retailed for US$2600. In 1977 the stand-alone 4K/48K Apple II system-board could be purchased for US$600/1900. The Apple II was powered by a MOS Technology 6502 clocked at 1.023 MHz. The original Apple II came with 4K-48K of RAM (4K or 16K DRAMs) and 8K of ROM.
The Apple II featured a 52-key ASCII keyboard, eight internal expansions slots, built-in speaker, composite video output, 2x paddles and 1500 bps cassette interface. The Apple II supported audio cassette tape recorders or 5.25" 140K disk drives (Apple Disk II). The Apple II could be hooked up to a composite color monitor or conventional television set via RF modulator.
The Apple II came bundled with 5K Applesoft Integer BASIC, System Monitor/Utilities in ROM and either one cassette tape with the 4K model or three cassette tapes with 16K models and above. Programs on the cassette tapes included 4K Color Demo, 4K of Breakout, 16K High Resolution Graphics Demo, Applesoft Floating Point Basic Language and 16K Star Trek.
Apple 2 graphics is displayed in 15-color 140x192 resolution, with a color-fringing effect; high-res is 2-color 280x192 resolution. The Apple 2 supported 2-button analog joysticks.
One of the best Apple 2 games is Silas Warner's Castle Wolfenstein of 1981.
Castle Wolfenstein is one of the most conceptually-advanced computer games of the very early 80s.
Castle Wolfenstein was influenced by the Berzerk shooter and would lead eventually to Wolfenstein 3D.
FS1 Flight Simulator Apple 2 1979
One of the most extraordinary Apple 2 games was SubLOGIC's 16 kbyte A2-FS1: Flight Simulator of 1979. Designed and coded by Bruce Artwick in 6502 assembler, FS1 would lead to Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 of 1982 and the 16-bit SubLOGIC FS2 on the Amiga in 1986, which was souped-up in MSFS 3.0 of 1988 for IBM PC.
FS1 came out in the same year as VisiCalc on the Apple 2, which was the first commercial spreadsheet program available for a personal computer.... this is the timeframe we're in.
As of 2025 FS1 is a 46 year-old computer game.
FS1 cockpit instrumention includes air speed, altimeter, tachometer, oil pressure gauge, oil temperature gauge, compass and fuel gauge. Indicators include turn rate, vertical velocity, roll rate, elevator, throttle, stall and armament.
There are two simulators in FS1: navigation and kinematic. Navigation handles position, velocity and heading whereas kinematic employs no fewer than 13 factors, including lift, drag and gravity.
In 1979, FS1 simulated flight of the Sopwith Camel light aircraft at up to 120 MpH over a wireframe 6x6 grid of terrain representing 36 square miles, while dogfighting, bombing and barrel-rolling. But no, the Sopwith Camel of 1917 cannot perform a loop-the-loop -- don't get too carried away!
FS1 employs SubLOGIC's own A2-3D1 graphics driver and high performance line generator that was capable of drawing 150 lines per second in FS1.
Amusingly, one can fly outside of the grid boundaries to reach... the void. Be sure to scream into the void when you get there.
Best Apple 2 Arcade Game
Even though its screen-scrolling was not smooth, relative to its time of release the best Apple 2 arcade game was Dan Gorlin's Choplifter of 1982.
In 1982 not many personal computer games could match Choplifter's gameplay and fun-factor.
Best Apple 2 Port
The best Apple 2 port is Dan Hewitt's 1984 conversion of Namco's Xevious of 1982.
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