A stick figure long forgotten: Alfredo on the Apple //

By Joe Fourhman | June 13, 2009

You’re going to have to admit your age if you recall Softdisk, an early floppy disk-based magazine for the Apple //. We had a couple of them when I was a kid, and the chief highlight was Adventures of Alfredo, a computer-animated stick figure cartoon about a little guy who was constantly getting killed (shades of Wile E. Coyote and South Park’s Kenny).

I just found a bunch of Alfredo cartoons in YouTube and was disturbed at how well I remembered them. I always assumed that Alfredo was animated “live” as the code was read (IE, this was not a Quicktime file, to jump ahead a generation or two), so does that make Alfredo among the first CG cutscenes rendered in real time?