Forever Pong…
copyright
Space Invaders at the Beach Club, Panama City Beach, FLA…
Quarters, engaged.
Damn, I sucked at peek-a-boo. Never could quite get the hang of the UI.
1 Like
While far from my first video game experience, one of my fondest memories was a camping site in Italy my parents used to take us to. Every year they had four or five new arcade cabinets and I spent most of my time with them. It was pretty cheap too, 500 lira a play. Together with a friend of mine we beat Metal Slug, Vendetta and Tumblepop, still some of my favourite games to this day.
On a 286 as a five year old. Good times.
My sister and I had a Merlin, and also Simon, which was arguably fun. But the 2600 was awesome for a while there. We started with Combat and Space Invaders, of course. Eventually I got hold of Pitfall, which to this day is probably my favorite platformer.
I got surprisingly good at the 2600 version of Asteroids (surprising because I had neither the time nor discipline nor raw talent to excel at most videogames). I could play long stretches until I’d accumulated the maximum number of extra lives (99, I think), then sit down to dinner and let the lives expire one by one, and after dinner I’d still have enough left to continue the game.
On the Easy setting, of course. ;^)
1 Like
Oddly I don’t much remember the NES games we played way back. I mean I do some (Punch out and never being able to beat mike tyson, staring in awe at my uncle demolishing double dragon 2, this one baseball game we had…)
There’s three games that stand out in my mind though.
Excitebike because first game we rented and the fact it had an editor.
xexyz because that is the last nes game I remember playing on real hardware.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade because i was ten, Turtles were the ‘thing’, that was the first arcade game I played, and even if the graphics weren’t as good the nintendo version played pretty nice when I was at a friend’s house.
Oh there’s lots more; mortal kombat, my uncle beating the crap out of me at madden, streets of rage 2… but the nes is where my small years were.
I guess there was also playing Duck Hunt on the demo NES in Boots in Loughborough town centre of a Saturday.
1 Like
IIRC, Atari 2600 games and arcade games (had Pac-Man fever!).
1 Like
Pong. A hotel my family was staying at in California, 1978. Me 6 years old, vs. my sister 9 years old. It ended badly 
Pong and hockey on a Binatone console with built-in light gun. I played it for hours, but was always slightly envious of the lucky kids with their 2600s. I’m pretty disappointed that there isn’t a good wikipedia article on the console, but unfortunately I don’t know enough facts to write one.
I don’t even remember the name of the first console we got, although I think Pong (or some version of it) was the only available game, so I lost interest in the thing pretty quickly. I’m not sure it even lasted until the next Christmas.
It was 1981 or '82 that we got our first Intellivision console. I don’t remember whether it lasted one or two years before breaking right around Christmas. My father took it to a repair shop which quoted him the price of an Intellivision II, so we got one of those instead.
A couple of years later I would type seemingly endless lines of BASIC into a TRS-80 to try and run a card game that never would quite work, even after thorough re-checking of every line.
The funny thing is when I read “gaming” I immediately thought of D&D, which was so much more important to me than video games ever would be.
1 Like
Vic-20, Omega Race (“Set in the year 2003, the game involves using a spaceship to destroy enemy droid ships.”), which was a cartridge ripoff of Asteroids from '82. Soon after we moved up to the C-64 where I zipped through all the levels of Bruce Lee nearly every single day before falling down the hole that was Infocom.
My mind reels when I think about all the emulators I have on my phone that let me play Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle again. If you had told me back then I would carry all these things around on a phone I keep in my pocket that lets me also change the thermostat on the wall from across the country I would have branded you a witch. But these days? Hooray for witches!
1 Like
I played Pong at a friend’s house when I was in 3rd grade, I think. Then there was the year the Atari 2600 came out and I wanted it for Christmas. My father said there was no way he was going to buy something that encouraged us to spend MORE time in front of the TV. Christmas morning came and, as expected, there was no console under the tree. But after most of the gifts were opened and I had honestly forgotten about it, I noticed an unwrapped, uninteresting box off to the side away from the action, and it said Atari on it. I literally fell over, giggling like a crazy person. My father is a good actor and a sneak. He probably regretted the purchase later on when I made it my life’s mission to score 1,000,000 point in Missile Command. Anyway, that started the electronic gaming addiction that is still with me today. Atari let to computers, PC games, PC builds, a programming career and eventually a return to consoles in 2003 when I built a home theater and hooked an Xbox to it.
1 Like
Earliest? Me and my old man playing on his Atari 2600. Most prominent? Me and the old man battling through Alex Kidd on the Sega Master System (my first console) - I’m sure we went through at least 5 controllers on that game alone.
I never had the joy of owning a cassette loading console - but I had a friend that did.
Funny that at the time we had no trouble justifying a 20 minute wait for a game to load, whereas I just spent 10x more on an SSD to cut out 20 seconds of loading bars.
2 Likes
Big up the 2600. I only remember a few games from my pa’s collection, a basketball one and an F1 game. Both were beyond basic, but still kept me glued to the TV for hours.
1 Like
Night Driver! One of the weird quirks of the 2600 is how it came with the most primitive and crappy joystick imaginable, but also came with a rather nice analog wheel that almost no game used outside of a few racing games and Pong/Breakout.
The really interesting thing about the 2600 is how much variety there was in the games despite the rediculously primitive hardware in the thing. The hardware was basically set up to do Pong, with only two sprites, two 1 pixel missiles, and 1 ball supported. That’s it. Now go back and think about games like Space Invaders, which would seem impossible to do with just those resources. Even Pac Man would seem impossible. Yet people figured out how to make it work, and in the most incredibly efficient way possible (because they only had 4k of code and 128 bytes of RAM, and mere dozens of CPU cycles per line).
These days game machines have many orders of magnitude more power, and yet we’re stuck with the same football simulators and brown/grey shooters year after year.
I love it. I had a tape drive for VIC back in the day
To be fair, horrendously slow load times were not greeted with love and appreciation back in the day either. It’s just something you put up with because the technology was what it was.
Hell, we had a C64 growing up and it had a real disk drive. Yay! No more waiting for ages for something to load. Then somehow magically Commodore managed to make their disk drive just as slow as a tape.
