Merry Christmas!

Published on Magic Disk 64 12/89

Merry Christmas! is an electronic holiday greeting card that is mildly interactive. As a kid I thought it was quite neat, and I sort of made a tradition out of starting it up every Christmas and showing it to my parents and grandparents, much to the latter's bewilderment.

I'm writing this article in February, so I'm either two months late or ten months early.

The program opens with this festive scene of a flashing message inside a very rectangular forest clearing. This is the interactive part, a prompt for you to enter your name. You are only allowed to enter letters and spaces, and your name cannot start with a space. Whatever letter you enter first is automatically capitalized.

Naturally, there is no text filter, so you can pretty much enter anything you want, within the above-mentioned restrictions.

Hm, by pressing '[' as the first letter, I seem to have caused some minor confusion.

From this bug you can kind of see that the capital letters are made up of four regular characters, arranged in a 2x2 grid. This is common practice for larger bitmap fonts. '[' was never intended to be a capital letter, so the mapping is wrong. It seems to point to PETSCII code 47, which is '/'. I assume that '/' is the invisible top left character which was left blank for this font. After that follows PETSCII code 48, which is '0', and code 49 and 50 for '1' and '2'.

As soon as you press enter (or reach the name entry character limit), the merriment of Festivus switches into high gear. I captured a video of the whole thing for your delectation:

Isn't this lovely and wholesome? Just look at the moon:

Aww, his nightcap matches his stocking!

I don't think I ever saw those pixel artifacts in the starry sky on my original C64. It's possible that the disk image I'm using here was created from a floppy disk with minor corruptions.


The music, while basic in its instrumentation, is a pleasant rendition of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas".

I remember using that tune for a cassette tape recording with my cousin where I voiced a couple of elderly ladies who blew themselves up with bootleg Christmas fireworks. That's what we did for entertainment before the Internet was a thing.


Despite the video, here's also a recap in still pictures, because I have some nonsense to say about it:

Santa's route to this particular home doesn't look very efficient. He moves back and forth across the screen four times until he finally comes to a halt on the roof. Maybe it's because his regular sleigh is in the garage, and this replacement only comes with one stubborn reindeer.

Saint Nicholas gets off the sleigh, grabs his sack and slowly makes his way across the roof while the reindeer eyes him suspiciously.

As soon as Nick starts descending the chimney, his sack just vanishes. Maybe he threw it down first to soften the landing.

And then he lands like a klutz, spreading soot all over the living room. One would think that centuries of experience in home invasion made him a professional, but this is decidedly unsubtle.

What's with the shifty eyes, Santa? That slightly deformed Christmas tree not good enough for you? Maybe he's just trying to make sure nobody noticed his botched arrival.

Since nobody started screaming or burst into the room with a baseball bat, Santa feels safe enough to go ahead and fill the single stocking with presents.

After that he makes a beeline for the... Black Russian? Wait a minute, what happened to milk and cookies? Whatever drink it is, Santa is deeply delighted by its taste.

Which results in him getting deeply drunk mere seconds later. He stumbles around for a while until he finds his way back into the fireplace.

Father Christmas activates his anti-gravity boots to float up the chimney and then sits back down on the sleigh, causing the reindeer to spring into action and exit stage left.

And so Santa flies away, on to the next of many homes he still has to bestow gifts on that night.

Oh, wait, he's coming back. Did he forget something?

No, he simply decided to bring presents to the same house twice in a row. There must've been something far more sinister in that drink than just alcohol.

Seeing how Santa is now stuck in an endless loop, the moon will most likely never get his presents. Instead, he can only helplessly watch Mr. Kringle keep on visiting the same home over and over again until the old man succumbs to exhaustion. Or alcohol poisoning.

Wow, this got a bit dark in the end. Sorry about that.



CONCLUSION

All in all, Merry Christmas! is a nice little program that I still like firing up from time to time (well, mostly during Christmas season). Sadly, I have no idea who made this, as there are no credits I could find. If anyone has some more information, please let me know. Then I can update this section.