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I typed in stuff from Compute! magazine. They had a neat helper program to show a simple checksum of each line in the margin, so you could catch typos more easily. To make things even more fun I didn't have a tape drive so I got really good at typing in my games each time I felt like playing :)

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Oh wow, I wrote games for Compute! magazine. Rather, ported them. Readers would submit games for their particular computer, an editor would select a few for each issue, and then we'd port them to the other popular 8-bit micros. Best high school job ever.

IIRC the guy who wrote the checksum generator also wrote the common assembly language graphics routines we used for all the games.

That's amazing. The game I had was called "Biker Dave" for Atari 800XL [1] and it was a little biker sprite jumping over obstacles.

[1] This was it: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-biker-dav...

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