Arcade Volleyball

Forty kilobytes. That's smaller than most email signatures today. Arcade Volleyball from Microforum fits inside that space with room to spare, and somehow it still managed to eat entire afternoons in 1987.

There is no story. No campaign, no unlockables, no tutorial screen with a smiling coach explaining the rules. Two players, a net down the middle, a ball in the air, and two little figures that look like someone drew a stick man, thought better of it halfway through, and left it at that. Your job is to keep the ball off the ground on your side. That's volleyball. That's the whole game.

The mechanics are about as stripped down as it gets. You move left and right, you jump, the ball bounces off you and hopefully clears the net. There's no spike button, no topspin, no setting up plays. What little strategy exists comes from reading where the ball is going and positioning yourself a half-second early, because the controls have exactly the kind of delay you'd expect from something running on a 4.77 MHz processor. You learn to compensate. After ten minutes it starts to feel natural. After twenty you're arguing with whoever's sitting next to you.

The CGA palette gives you four colors — that particular shade of cyan, magenta, white, and black that burned itself into a generation of retinas. The graphics are skeletal but readable. The ball is a ball. The net is a net. The court is a rectangle. Everything does what it looks like it should do, which is more than you can say for a lot of games from this era that tried to do much more. The PC speaker produces a sound on each hit that's somewhere between a bleep and a thud. It's not music. It's punctuation.

What made this stick in memory isn't the technology or the depth — it's the purity of the head-to-head loop. Two people, shared keyboard, sudden death on every rally. The game was never going to impress anyone on its own. It needed a second human being sitting next to you, and when that was in place it delivered something genuinely mean and competitive. You'd lose track of the score. You'd play one more game seventeen times in a row.

Today it runs in the browser in seconds and takes about thirty seconds to explain to anyone. That's still its best trick. If you have someone next to you willing to share a keyboard and argue over a CGA volleyball court, it holds up in exactly the way a good, dumb, loud board game holds up. Alone it's a curiosity. With someone else it's a problem, because neither of you will want to be the one who quits first.