Geeking Out Across Boundaries
KansasFest attendees say they travel to KansasFest
to feel like kids again. They stay up all night laughing,
arguing, and eating pizza. They program and play games
on their Apple II machines and call each other nerds or
geeks — and these are definitely terms of affection.
Bullied as a boy, Martin Haye describes
KansasFest as the childhood he wished he’d had. “If I
had this when I was 13, I would’ve been fine,” said Haye,
a programmer for the California Digital Library who lives
in Santa Cruz. “I didn’t try to fit in, but I was little. I car-
ried a briefcase to school; I was a target. I have a good
life now, but this week is the most intense, sustained,
predictable happiness I’ve ever had.”
The 86 people who registered for the 2016
KansasFest came from all over the United States,
Canada, and even Australia. They were an eclectic
group of teachers, doctors, gamers, knitters, com-
puter scientists, a beekeeper, and a former semipro
football player who also does acting gigs for Japanese
television.
At KansasFest, you’ll find straight, gay, and
transgender people. The fact that none of that matters
is intensely meaningful for Haye, who would never have
attended his first KansasFest in 2009 if it weren’t for the
gentle prodding of his husband.
Haye had his misgivings. He saw Missouri as part
of the Bible Belt, a conservative region of the United
States that has historically been intolerant of the LGBTQ
community. Also, the conference was at Rockhurst
University, a Catholic school. Haye was concerned that
he would have to hide who he was at the festival.
But his husband reminded him how much he
loved the Apple II. Haye had discovered the computer
at age 14, the same year he realized he was gay. He
began to play games on the computer and teach him-
self basic programming. Haye dreamed of creating his
own game and publishing it.
So he attended in 2009, figuring that if the social
scene was awkward, he’d stay in his dorm room all week
programming on his Apple II. He ended up making many
friends and felt so comfortable, he even mentioned he
was gay. It didn’t matter.
One of the friends he found at KansasFest is Bill
Martens. An imposing figure, wearing a cowboy hat and
gray beard, Martens is an ex–football player and gen-
erally conservative in his political views. Nonetheless,
he said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, pink,
or purple. We don’t give a [crap] about anything but
the Apple II. We get to have fun geeking out with like-
minded people.”
Martens, along with Brian Wiser, helped
Nibble
magazine founder Mike Harvey publish a book of
his writings on the computer industry called
Nibble
Viewpoints
. Martens and Wiser also collaborated with
Steve Wozniak to publish
The WOZPAK, a now-famous
collection of the Apple II creator’s handwritten notes and
printouts about the iconic computer.
Always looking for new projects, Martens and
Wiser approached Haye with another idea. A game Haye
had built in 2012 was popular among Apple II users, and
Martens and Wiser wanted to help him bring the game
to the iPhone and iPad.
Haye’s game, Structris, is inspired by Tetris. The
player tries to avoid getting crushed by blocks of differ-
ent shapes that drop into a square space. As the player
conquers each level, the blocks fall faster into smaller
places, making them increasingly difficult to dodge.
It took more than two years for Martens, Wiser,
and an iOS developer to convert the game, but Structris
eventually became available for download on iTunes
for $1.99. Haye had finally become a published game
developer.
“We are all unified by that one thing, the Apple II,”
Haye said. “It seems so weird that this is what unifies us
across all those boundaries.” But maybe it’s not weird
at all.
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