Evets Kainzow

January 3, 2018

Question from E-mail

What are your views on the importance of computer games in the role of a platforms sucess? Do you still play computer and console games? If so, what are some of your favorites?

Woz

Not much due to lack of time. My kids beat me at almost anything. I am extremely good at Tetris on the Gameboy and had my name listed in Nintendo Power magazine a few times in the early days for my top scores. After they wouldn’t print my name any more I submitted an entry with my names spelled backwards, Evets Kainzow, and they printed it! When I saw the issue, I’d forgotten that I’d sent it in and was worried that someone was challenging my own level! My current high score is 702,000 and my goal is 750,000. I gave GameBoys to Gorbeshev and Bush when they were in office. A week or so later Bush had heart problems. On TV he was shown playing the Game Boy in the hospital.

I also roll the score over (1,000,000 points) on the Williams “Defender” arcade game, which I have in my home.

I play solitaire on my PowerBook and once won 33 games in a row, standard settings. The trick is to only play the ones that deal a very good setup and to back up as much as possible to find a win if it doesn’t come easily.

I like reading the Bridge column in the paper, and our paper carries a ScrabbleGram word game. I play this almost every day and wrote programs to solve it and I put it on the web (Scrabblegram.com) for a while a couple of years ago.

I don’t mind gambling. Video Poker slot machines are my favorite. But I’m watching my 14 year old daughter for luck. She was in Las Vegas with me (and my class of 11 year olds, who were attending a “Mac Academy” in Ceasar’s Palace and played Keno for the first time. She won $1600 on a $1 ticket. This was at age 9. Her second time was at age 12. I told her not to expect to win when she plays Keno. But, during breakfast, when I looked up she’d won $7500. I wish I’d copied her numbers.