In the footsteps of Têtards, the first Quebec video game

In 1982, the Atari 2600 console and the Commodore 64 computer had their heyday, Tetris did not yet exist and the video game Ms. Pac-Man won the arcades. Meanwhile, in Quebec, teenagers Marc-Antoine Parent and Vincent Côté published with Logidisque Tadpoles for the Apple II, the first video game designed and published in the province.

Tadpoles was a derived from Pac-Mansummarize the two high school friends, whose complicity is intact despite years of not seeing each other.

In a maze, we controlled two tadpoles led by one person each. It was quite an original idea at the time.underlines Marc-Antoine Parent. On a single keyboard, a player used the letters W, A, S, and Z, and [il y avait] the equivalent on the other side for the [second joueur].

When the tadpoles met face to face, it made a little heart and they laid an egg. Afterwards, you had to return to the maze and eat the egg before the other. […] But if you got behind the other tadpole, you ate it. Everyone had three liveshe explains.

We thought we were going to be millionaires within two years [grâce à ce jeu]!

The associates worked on Tadpoles during the summer between their 4^e et 5^e secondary. Vincent Côté took care of the graphics and animation in the introduction to the game and Marc-Antoine Parent was in charge of the code.

At the time, the debuggers didn’t existhe insists, nostalgic. I remember writing a lot of code and it didn’t work. I was discouraged. I went to Maine with my family, I brought my listing and I made corrections.

There are parts that I corrected properly and others where I wrote pieces of code that compensated for the error. My “patchs” had “patchs“ : he was a monster when it came to coding.

The challenge was great since the file on the game floppy disk had to be at most 16kcar the entire Apple II’s memory was 48k at the timeestimate the two friends, who complete each other’s sentences.

I’m not particularly proud of this thingadmits Mr. Parent, now in his fifties.

Indeed, the idea of Tadpoles did not necessarily come from them.

The Logidisque adventure

In 1982, Louis-Philippe Hébert, writer and columnist, founded Logidisque, the first French-speaking software publishing house in Quebec. He had resigned himself to going into business on the advice of university colleagues to whom he had graciously offered his word processing software manipulated on his Apple II at home.

The beginnings of Logidisque in a small rented space on Saint-Jean Street, in Montreal, attracted curious people such as Vincent Côté and Marc-Antoine Parent. The latter knew Mr. Hébert through his parents, both employees of Radio-Canada.

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The presence of young people in his office suited Louis-Philippe Hébert. At the time, you couldn’t find people who had completed their computer course and were working with microcomputers. […] It was mainly young people who had knowledge or people who had learned on their own, a bit like mehe says.

Marc-Antoine was particularly talented, with good knowledge of computershe remembers.

The writer does not remember the fine details about how Logidisque came to make Tadpoles. Often, a concept was the result of two or three peoplehe suggests. But the fundamental idea was to know if we were capable of doing the same thing [que Pac-Man, auquel on jouait sur une console ou à l’arcade] on an Apple II.

With Marc-Antoine and Vincent, we were in pure and simple adventure. We saw if it worked, and [lorsque ça arrivait]we were like, “Oh wow, it works!” We couldn’t believe it.

The design of Tadpoles even earned them what they call their 15 minutes of fame with a report broadcast in 1982 on Radio-Canada with the late journalist Daniel Pinard.

In talking with these budding computer scientists, the journalist often refers to Martins. Vincent Côté has often heard this word: At the time, computing was quite new. It let everyone down. This jargon is incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

We had a lot of prestige after the interview and all the media fluff. But before that, we were the weird ones […]we, the “geek nerds”. It wasn’t clear that they were going to become millionaires.

Mr. Côté likes to remember a wise phrase he heard from Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and today a billionaire: Be kind to nerdsyou might work for one of them someday.

A career far from video games

If you think the duo had a prolific career in video games, think again: their video game adventure ended after Tadpoles. The two long-time friends don’t consider themselves gamers either, with the exception of a few favorite games.

We are named in academic papers on the history of video games [du Québec]but we have no connection with anything that happened afterwards.

Mr. Côté studied computer science at university, worked for nearly a decade at the Paris Stock Exchange and is now a self-employed financial analyst in Montreal. He has developed some software in his young career, including Mega-Texta word processing tool for children on which Marc-Antoine Parent collaborated, perhaps even under a pseudonym, in order to circumvent contractual obligations with Logidisque, he confides, amused.

The latter knew that he was going to make computers all his life. He has collaborated in the development of numerous software programs, including the French correction tool Corrector 101.

Following his interests in artificial intelligence, Mr. Parent studied biomathematics and systems sciences. He now works as a freelance software architect specializing in knowledge representation.

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Logidisque founder Louis-Philippe Hébert has published a handful of other video games, including Mimi the ant et Arsene Larcininspired by the famous burglar Arsène Lupin.

His company has done a lot in computer manuals and software development: we also owe him the French correction tool still integrated to this day into Microsoft Wordhe boasts. Logidisque was sold to Quebecor, a company the writer left in 2002.

Regarding Tadpolesthe last time the two friends tried to launch this game on an Apple II computer was in 2016, during a special activity of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationaux du Québec (BAnQ). Without success.

Hope remains: an Ontarian, Stéphane Racle, who is participating in an effort to preserve Apple II software, suggested that they give it a try. But Vincent Côté refuses to send his only copy of the game by mail. That will have to wait until his next trip to Ottawa to be sure.