And now for something completely different.
I grew up on an Apple IIgs. I must have been six or seven years old when my father bought it for our family. I remember spending my computer time learning how to use a mouse with some pretty addictive games — and then there was Bolo.
The Apple IIgs days were pretty exciting, but they didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. For about 18 years, I completely forgot about what I did on the Apple II (and my favorite game Bolo, including the title of the game) until the game screen flashed into my head this past weekend. I was determined to find that game to relive my childhood.
My efforts asking peers were fruitless. Not many people were using computers at all in the 80s. The revolution began in the 90s when computers were deemed to be useful tools for every home.
I searched and searched, and thanks to Webomatica, I found out the name of the game and took it from there. I can’t believe there are emulators for this — but I guess there’s nothing to do now that the Apple II has been replaced by bigger, better, and more powerful machines.
I’m happy to say that I’ve been successful in getting AppleWin and the old version of Bolo on my computer and still subconsciously knew how to play the game. Man, that was addictive.
I’m curious to know how many others among us, if any, may have had one of those games that you couldn’t pass up when you moved to bigger and better equipment. I’m not a gamer, but this was one of those puzzles that somehow made its way back into my consciousness, which must mean that it did make an impression that was just waiting to be awakened. I’m happy I found it.
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Tamar Weinberg is a social media enthusiast with a passion for all things tech and productivity. She provides consulting in internet marketing and is the Community and Marketing Manager at Mashable. Tamar is also the author of 
{ 36 comments… read them below or add one }
hmm ,looks interesting ill have to take a look at that. my fav old school game was pong
Pong… ah yes, that classic. But it was so widely available that nobody can forget such a name. This one, however, was an incredible challenge that I spent days trying to go at!
Thanks again to Jason at Webomatica for his help.
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Wow, and I thought I was the only one! I used to spend hours trying to crack the top levels of Bolo! I ended up motoring backwards at top speed firing as best I could at the drones. Mis-spent youth, or what?
I did the same thing, Julian. You’re not the only one. I think it’s impossible.
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Don’t suppose you could send me the game file(s) so I can try and make it work with AppleWin too? Might impress the kids! (julianptechstuff@googlemail.com)
Sent you email.
I don’t have it on this computer but you can search for it!
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I liked a game on the Apple II called Rescue Raiders. You dispatched tanks and troops and commanded everything with a helicopter.
I loved Bolo. At the top levels you travel full speed with gun pointed backwards or sideways to destroy the enemy fighters. You learn where the enemy fort is, and then you head straight toward it, at full speed with gun pointed forward, firing a couple shots at specific intervals followed by crashing your tank into the fort kamikaze style. Sometimes, this was the only way to destroy the enemy fort since the enemy fighters were so fast. Wish I had that game.
I used to play this game in junior high around 1983. We had a really cool math teacher that would sell us 5 1/4 inch double-sided floopies and let us play games during ‘off times’. I used to hang out and play games with my old buddy Sidney Vannoy.
I had looked for the name of this game in the past and was unable to find it. Thanks. Brings back old memories.
I *loved* this game. I dug up the ROM but found the game hard to play in the AppleWin emulator. I actually bought an Apple ][ so I could play the game for real. Of course, I don’t have the original game disk nor a working joystick, so alas, I still haven’t recreated that early 80’s experienced. This is one of my favorite games of all time.
Bolo Came in COLOUR ????
i spent many many Many houres looking at the green screen. and Now you tell me. Time to unearth the ][e and the Five and a quarter disc.
Cheers,
Kilroy
Nostalgia – I’ve been looking all over the web to locate Bolo program for the Apple IIe but no succes. My floppies have been trashed long ago – a shame. Can someone point me in the right direction?
Philippe – use AppleWin and search online for bolo.dsk.gz. Then run AppleWin, open the disk image, and type BRUN. That should do it for you.
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Hi Tamar,
Would you be able to send me the emulator to play rescue raiders on my pc (Win Vista)? I love this game so much as it is my childhood game. Please help me to fulfill my dreams
Luv,
David
David, all the information I know is in this post. Google is at your disposal.
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I cant believe that I’ve finally found a group of people who understand what bolo for the Apple II was all about. Every once in a while I would do a google search but keep ending up with references to the newer multi-player version, such a bummer! I thought knowledge of this was gone forever. Now I just need somebody to reprogram for PCs.
Ryan, I totally agree! This game rocked and it was almost impossible to find.
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Hi, another Bolo fan here! I tried looking it up on Wikipedia but it directs to a different game by the same name. I agree with Jeffery Rankin — that’s exactly the way I eventually ended up playing. Very fast and fun, with the enemies at top speed, the turret turned ’round and the maze at a low level of density. It was great how adjustable it was. Does anyone know the names of the programmers?
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Ok this is awesome. i hope someone will read this. i just downloaded the applewin program but i cannot find the bolo game anywhere. im still looking though. my email is ladillon79@hotmail.com
someone email me and tell me….
Hey Bolo !!
Alltime high !
im form germany and i did play the game till i passed out
it was one of my the best games ever .. at level 5 you could still drive full speed and destroy anything moving ..
i agree with the other persons here .. on the highest level
you didnt had any other choice then hit the bunker 2 times and drive the tank into it to destroy it …
hmm.. i maybe have to look up my old GS and hardrive .. if its still running
The 5″ disks dont work for sure anymore ..
but i have still both .. my first computer , Apple II+
the IIGs , a IIe and a IIc
ahwell
when i was young .. and my life was a open *g*
cheers
SEan
uh
by the way .. the quadrat is a radar ..
it looks into the nearest bunker ..
and you have to drive vertical and when both quadrants of the quadrat are full you are having it locked vertical ..
then you only have to get horisontal to find it
and vice versa
Cheers
Sean
montezuma’s revenge, floppy, bolo, alice in wonderland, super pitfall (the weird nes version)
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Hey– I’m not that computer savy but I loved this game as a kid— How do I get in on my Mac? In the words of Michael Scott, explain it to me like I’m 5.
Thanks!
Ryan, sorry, I am not volunteering any additional information than what I provided in this post. Plus, I don’t have a Mac so I have nothing to offer you.
I already explained how to get Bolo for the PC here. (And Alexander Reid, maybe you should’ve read that instead of spamming me and my friends.)
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As far as I know, it is possible to win at the highest level of the game. It’s hard to do, though – deliberately so. Most computer games of the time were easy enough that players would get tired of them fairly quickly. Bolo was designed to be challenging even for very practiced players.
There was a minor extra built in to the game. If you did manage to win at the highest level, something happened on the screen. It wasn’t major; just enough that knowing about would prove that you actually had won, at least until word got out.
James Lane
Author of the Apple ][ game, “Bolo”
James, that’s awesome – thanks for contributing to the comments here. And that’s so cool! I guess I’ll be compelled to try to beat the game now!
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I remember taking one sided floppy discs and cutting a notch so to make it a two sided floppy which could hold the BOLO game.I think maybe this was before Apple II(1984 -85)If anyone knows where to get the old original BOLO please post.BOLO was the best.Thanks
Finally I found what I was looking for! bolo! But i’m having problems. I downloaded applewin. I downloaded bolo.dsk.gz on my desktop. I opened ‘disk image for drive 1′. I typed BRUN in the pop up where file name goes and nothing happens. I tried selecting BRUN.DSK thats in my folder and nothing happens. All help is greatly appreciated!
Gerald: Yup, I remember cutting notches in floppies, too. But the first time I did that, they were 8″ floppies, not 5 1/4″
Re playing/winning at the highest difficulty levels: IIRC, there were 9 levels. I don’t think I ever won a game above level 6, and even that was rare. I figured that there would be players much more skilled than I was, and I hoped that the extra 3 levels might be enough to challenge even them.
If you have the original game, and particularly if you have access to at least a picture of an Apple ][ keyboard, take a look at the game controls. There were three sets: the joystick, a set of keys on the left side of the keyboard, and a set on the right side of the keyboard.
It was built that way to allow two simultaneous players; one as driver and another as gunner. Of course, it also supports three players, but I didn't have any idea how they could split up the workload.
Some Bolo trivia:
As far as I know, Bolo was the first published, commercial game that had a tie-in to a novel (or novels, in this case). Unfortunately, Keith Laumer refused to write a scenario description. My (now-ex) wife and I came up with it. To the relief of readers everywhere, I haven't had anything to do with any short-short story (or any other length story) since.
Bolo was inspired by a game I saw running as a demo on some now long-forgotten small computer. I think the demo was supposed to show off the machine's monochrome-only graphics. A friend and I started Bolo together, but he dropped out for various reasons (incl. moving out of state) early on.
Bolo had to be done in time for a holiday season deadline, but it still had a serious bug in the linked list code that handled the smartest tanks. It happens when a smartest-type tank crosses a cell boundary; probably only when that tank is at the end of the linked list. I was too tired (full time day job + part time game author) to fix it before the deadline. Finding it, fixing it, and publishing the fix would be a nice service someone could do for the handful of people who still remember the game.
Fame doesn't last
. IIRC, Bolo tied ChopLifter for SoftTalk Magazine's #1 game of the year (1982?)
There are never more than 32 enemy tanks in the game. When the player gets close enough to a base (but still out of sight of the base), tanks that the player can't see are deleted so they can be generated to protect the base.
At one point a few years ago, I was thinking of doing some software development on PDA platforms, and a friend of mine suggested writing a PDA version of Bolo to learn the platform. I ended up putting my Copious Free Time(tm) into a different game (a 4X PC game called Stars! Supernova) instead.
James Lane
Author of the Apple ][ game, “Bolo”
Bolo is great! There are a lot of great old Apple II games out there.
I used powerarchiver to unzip the .gz file then you load it into applewin and type brun bolo
I was in seventh grade back in the 80’s when I touched my first Apple ][. Bolo was the first video game I played on a PC. There just wasn’t enough time to play the entire game during class and when the bell rang I’d be so angry because the save option wasn’t invented then!!!. If only the new generation kids knew how convenient they have it now a days.
Thumbs up to you James Lane. Bolo is a game that always pops up in my head from time to time.
Me and my brother Curtis spent hours in the best multi-player game ever invented… bolo – so many good times coorporating as we fought for keyboard space on our apple II (the joystick didn’t work) and tried to not lock up the commands for the other player by holding down buttons… so many sore fingers and such an intense adrenaline rush experience. So fast paced! This was genius – thanks James … these were the good old days… games were simple, addictive and extremely challenging but you built your skills at them like a sport through so much practice
Jeremy
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Hi Guys!
I have one question about BOLO:
I wanna know if the level(difficulty) must increase after destroying 6 bases (completing the maze)?
I have impression I stay at the same level – the enemy tanks stay “stupid” even I managed to pass 3 mazes (respectively destroy 3×6 bases)
Best regards,
Pavel
IIRC, the game does not change the level of difficultly on its own. I figured that the players could decide what level they wanted to play at for themselves.
Hello Bolo fans! I played Bolo for hours and hours on my Apple //e with extended 80-column card (128k)! Whoo! Anyway, it’s great to hear from James Lane who authored the game. I really enjoyed it, and it had great gameplay. I used the keyboard for turning the turrent… sometimes I would play with a friend: one person driving, and one person shooting. The independent turret control was key to that!
I have also played the Bolo game for the Macintosh, which was one of the very first network games on TCP/IP networks. It is vastly different, but still based on the same sci-fi novel as the Apple ][ game. The Mac game is good, but the fondest memories are reserved for the original version! Thanks again for the memories.
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Holy cow, can’t believe I stumbled on this site … I too was one of the kids that spent many many hours playing games on the Apple ][e ‘back in the day’, and Bolo was my all-time favorite.
The schools I went to all had Apples, and my friends & I blew more than one lunch period playing Bolo. Never did get good enough to reach the end-game that James Lane mentioned, but I must admit I was pretty decent at it (practice makes perfect!), at least that’s the way I remember it lol
I tried the links/google-searches to emulate the game, but alas they are not working for me. I’ll keep at it.
James, kudos to you dude for posting up here. You brought a LOT of joy to a bunch of kids back in the early 80’s. I’ll be first in line should you develop another version of this simple, but most excellent shooter