Appendix. Extra Practice Salad Catch—Coding

Have you ever played baseball? If you’ve been up at bat, you know that you get a split second to decide whether or not to swing at the ball and then make a connection if you do decide to go for a hit. Baseball, like many early video games, is all about your reaction time.

Take, for instance, Atari’s Avalanche, one of the first reflex-testing video games (also called a twitch game), which came out back in 1978. The player controlled a stack of lines, which were used to catch falling rocks. A few years later, in 1981, Activision took Avalanche’s simple black-and-white graphics and remade the game as ...

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