Heavy Barrel -- circa 1987

This one I spent hours on and never beat. I found it miraculous that this was one of the few games that I had both seen in the arcades and was available for the Apple II. In the days before home-brewed porting of NES games, kids like me had to dream about what it would be like to play Super Mario Brothers at home. In Heavy Barrel, you had to collect pieces of this ultimate weapon, the Heavy Barrel, that you would need to defeat the final boss (your progress in picking up those pieces is depicted in the lower right corner of the video below). i never made it far enough to complete the Heavy Barrel, but i see from the clip (~10:11) that it was not quite as awesome as my 9-year self fantasized.