Video games in a nutshell

Being a child of the 80’s I grew up on the cusp of the video game revolution. What I mean by cusp is, I can still remember pre-Atari days where the only electronic games available were electronic football & baseball and memory games (handhelds with colored lights that moved). There were no console systems back then. To entertain yourself, you had to get by with board games, the rubick’s cube and the old fashioned killer lawn darts that could impale you. Arcades were the place to be and be seen in social circles and anytime I was dragged away on summer vacation with my parents to some god-forsaken cottage hick town, the first place I looked for was always an arcade. The arcades were always chock full of girls watching guys plunking a mass of quarters into pinball machines and early video game hits such as Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids. There was always the guy (or machine) that made change and kept everyone from smashing the machines in frustration. The machines even had built in ashtrays, you only had to leave’em to go to the bathroom-which of course you held off till the last minute, lest u lose your precious high score position and not be able to enter your initials FUK.

One of these arcade owners was a friend of the family and I scored myself an old game he wasn’t using for my basement. The table top version of Space Invaders in black & white! Table tops were those games where the screen was built into a glass table at which you sat at instead of the large standup games. When you opened it to look inside the heavy machine it was a twisted mess of wires, diodes & transformers. I was scared to put my hand in there to click the coin credit trip because one time I got a huge shock. If you wanted to play in color you had to insert colored cellophane over the screen and under the glass...look, BLUE! Wow! None the less, I was still the only kid in the neighborhood with his own video game, so my basement was a great place to chill.

Atari, Colecovision and other first generation console systems soon surfaced and began the dawn of a new era. I had the Atari, and I was always jealous over my friend who had the Coleco, it had way better graphics & games. I was totally addicted to those great games of the 80’s like Pressure Cooker, Frostbite, Moon Patrol, & Frogger, just to name a few. I also must have gone through 20 Atari Joystick controllers, the flimsiest of devices always busting on their own or from being thrown across the room.
Atari was great for awhile, but then came…..Nintendo! Holy fuck, will you look at the graphics on that! Duck Hunt, in glorious 8-bit 16 colors-OMG! This was the golden days of wasting time & skipping school. Nintendo launched a revolution that virtually spelled the end of the arcades. Soon video stores everywhere were renting games along with their Beta & VHS movies. Super Mario Brothers, Castlevania, Rampage, Zelda, Contra, and others gave me whole new ways of smashing controllers. And what’s this? Games that actually have endings? Now that’s epic. Before all you did was play and play for the high score with the levels repeating & getting faster. Now you actually had something to look forward to. Yes, Nintendo kicked ass. For awhile they had a monopoly of the market (Sega master system, don’t make me laugh). But then along came the Genesis.

Article Author: Mike G

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