Topic: Video Games

My history with video games dates back to 1972. I turned 15 in the fall of that year, and around the same time Magnavox released the Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console. Somehow I talked my dad into buying one. By today’s standards it was extremely crude. The play field was a black screen with short vertical white bars positioned to the far left and right sides of the TV screen. A small white box served as the puck or the ball or whatever it was called, and this bounced between the vertical lines. The controllers allowed one to move the vertical bars back and forth and up and down. The result was a form of electronic ping-pong, and this was commercially exploited by Atari later that year in the form of Pong, one of the first arcade video games.

The Odyssey was really limited. It came with various screen overlays to be taped to the TV screen, supposedly simulating soccer fields, football fields and so on but the game action never varied. My sister and I got tired of it pretty quickly. But a few years later Atari released its 2600 video game system. With this, one could play reasonable facsimiles of some of their arcade hits such as Space Invaders and Asteroids and Missile Command. I was hooked. I spent hours and hours playing Activision’s vertical scrolling shooter River Raid, to the point where my trigger button thumb stayed numb for days.

I stuck with Atari through the next iteration, the Atari 5200. By now the graphics were in color and more complex. Then I veered away from the console scene in favor of personal computers. My very first one was a Texas Instruments 99/4A. My favorite game was Tunnels of Doom, my first exposure to a Dungeons and Dragons type game. We loaded it onto the computer from a cassette tape. The price of a disk drive was WAY above my means at that time! My friends and I played this one for days on end. It was so exciting to find the stairway down to the next level of the dungeon and see what dangers lurked there. The graphics, again, were pitiful by today’s standards but our imaginations filled in the considerable gaps.

As the years passed I tried to keep up with the consoles and the computer scenes. I had a Nintendo Entertainment System, and an NEC Turbo-Grafx. Probably my favorite console of that era was my Colecovision. My favorite game on that machine was Mr. Do! We were playing this at my friend Larry’s house one day and I was on a roll —  my score was 250,000 (an all-time high) and I still had 9 extra lives. Then Larry’s dog Bogart ran across room, tripped over the power cord and unplugged the game. Everything was gone in a flash. It took me a long time to forgive Bogart for that. 

Then once again I switched to a computer — my beloved Commodore 64. I had a ton of games for it. I favored role playing games (RPGs), in particular The Bard’s Tale, Seven Cities Of Gold, and another one called The City, which I never got to finish because I accidentally formatted one of the game disks while trying to create a data disk. Other C64 owners will understand! I learned to program in BASIC on this wonderful little machine. I even tried my hand at programming my own shootin’ video game: Whirly-Beaver, which was an adult title, details of which I’ll leave to your imagination on the advice of my dear wife.

When I moved overseas in 1986 I sold everything but soon after I moved to Saudi I bought an Atari 1080 ST computer. My roommates and I played the brilliant Dungeon Master, an RPG with a revolutionary (for the time) pseudo-3D first-person perspective and real-time combat. It took us months to finish and we celebrated wildly when we finally defeated Lord Chaos.

In the early 90’s I got the Sega Genesis, and a ton of games for it as well. I was developing a pattern - I would buy a system, then buy more games than I would ever possibly be able to play. My pride and joy from this time was my SNK Neo Geo AES. The game cartridges for this system were at least as large as a VHS cassette and contained exact replicas of SNK’s arcade offerings. Interspersed among the years were various hand-held systems — the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Sega Game Gear and the NEC Turbo Express, for which I had the TV tuner as well.

Then my kids came along. I introduced them to video games, first the Super Nintendo and then the Nintendo 64. Next was the Game Boy Advance. My favorite game on this system was Golden Sun, another RPG. It had a sophisticated combat and magic system involving entities called djinn, which were various magical creatures one could attach to one’s character, altering one’s available spells and magical energy and so on. I finally mastered the system after playing a couple of weeks. Then I went on a cruise with the Game Boy Advance, Golden Sun, and Claire, my then five year old daughter. I was around 43 years old or so. She insisted on trying the game out. So I handed her the machine, confident she’d soon grow frustrated with the game’s complexities and the required amount of reading. But no — she had the whole damn system figured out in a couple of hours. She ended up loving it as much as I did and we literally fought over that Game Boy for the rest of the cruise. 

Nowadays I own an Xbox One X and a Playstation 4 Pro with the VR attachment. Keeping true to form I have way more games than I’ll ever be able to play. As video games have evolved their complexity has increased exponentially and unfortunately I no longer seem to have the motivation to learn all the minutiae of any particular game in order to be able to play it well. Current favorites include Cuphead on my Xbox and Skyrim  on the PS4. IMHO there’s a lot to be said for the simple gameplay of many of the earlier video games. Ms. Pacman, Frogger, Tempest -  simple to learn, hard to beat the high score on.

And I’m grateful to have been alive when video games emerged and evolved. I really appreciate the fantastic graphics and sophisticated game play now possible but I find that now I enjoy watching younger players more than I enjoy playing myself. Maybe I'm jaded. There was a genuine sense of wonder that accompanied experiencing brand-new games with new genres and better graphics and unique plots and control schemes and combat systems and so on. Now I feel like I’ve seen it all. Speed and number of objects on the screen at once and so on will keep evolving with successive iterations of hardware. But it’s been a long, long time since a new video game has awakened my sense of wonder and sheer…possibility. Now I’m fortunate to be part of a live D&D game at present and I’m finding that as I struggle overcoming my innate shyness and feelings of inferiority due to my rudimentary knowledge of the rules, my imagination is starting to fire up again - way better than any hardware.