I Am a Child from the Dawn of the Video Game Age
Taking a side trip here away from my adventures here. Anyone who knows me personally, can attest that I am somewhat of a geek and so it’s no surprise that I became an mechanical/aerospace engineer by trade. With that stated, I always had an interest in building things and tinkering with electronics, etc.. As I was growing up in the 70's I was fortunate to experience and be able to participate in the dawn of a new era. It all started simple enough with my father coming back from a business trip in Texas one year with one of the first ever digital calculators. I was hooked. I loved the display, the tactile feel of the buttons and the ease of use. I was further inspired when I saw advanced calculators becoming available and even into my high school and college years where I always had to have the latest programmable calculators for my science, math and eventually engineering courses. Now this seems pretty minor in this day and age, but back then, looong before cell phones, home computers, high level object oriented programming languages, etc.. this was an exciting era for me.
I really loved all things digital. One year, 1975 to be exact. My father bought the family an Atari (Sears Telegames) pong unit for christmas ($50 in 1970's money.. that was alot). I was in awe over this new toy. Whenever, my father and my family would go out to Sears, my father would always go over to the tools section and along the way we’d pass the sporting goods section… This is where they had a pong unit setup for customers to play. My dad and I were hooked. That Christmas I played the heck out of that Pong system, Pong, Pong Doubles, Basketball, Volleyball.. whatever it was called, I played it and got good. To this day, my son, who by the way owns my arse in any of the modern day games, still cannot beat his old man at a simple game of Pong. At least I’m still better than him at something :-)
In one of our visits to the department stores, I noticed Sears had a large Atari display unit in the sporting goods section and was amazed at the Target Shooting and Tank games. The colors, the sounds… these were amazing and mesmerizing. That same Christmas my neighbor got an Atari 2600 and I was over visiting to play Combat, Biplanes and Jets every chance I could. Pong just wouldn't do it for me anymore. I fondly remember getting the Sears wish books every year and looking through them as they had intimate descriptions and cartoon mock ups of all the new video games coming out. I saved my bottles, cans and newspapers hoping to earn enough to buy an Atari back then. They cost north of $200 at that time. That was a lot of money in 1970s dollars. A goal that seemed out be out of reach.
It just so happened, that one Christmas in 1980, a dream came true and there was an Atari 2600 under the tree. With the money I had scraped together, I was able to purchase 5 or so game cartridges that holiday season… these were $20 a piece and again, very expensive in today’s dollars. And then Atari released Space Invaders. Holy cow!! This was heaven. Next thing I knew, friends in school had them, other friends got an Intellivision and I thought that was cool as well (that was the beginning of the debates, as I can recall of which system was better). Atari had the arcade games, but the Intellivsion had an awesome Baseball and Hockey games with programmable controls… absolute fun with my friends playing, whittling away those long afternoon hours into the evening. However, prior to that, all during my time in school (starting in junior high school) I was in an honors math/science programs and part of that curricula allowed us to take field trips to the local community college where I was introduced to a Commodore Pet Computer. OH MY GOD!!! I was in heaven. I started loading games, big complex games from cassettes. I got my first taste of text based adventure games and Star Trek on the Main Frame Computer. From there I took computer classes in High School. Programming and playing games on a TRS80 with the monochrome screens. I was truly orbiting the cosmos. We then got an Apple II computer in school. COLOR! WOW! The sky was they limit. I began earnestly learning machine code in hopes of writing my own games. I played everything I could on the Apple. I would stay late after school and the teacher would essentially babysit a handful of us while we played and coded on the Apple IIs.
I soon got a part time job after High School at about the time the Colecovison was released along with many other systems, Vectrex, Commodore Vic 20/64, Atari 400/800 computers. I had a tough choice to make. I had to come up with gas and insurance to drive my moms car and any other miscellaneous expenses that came up. Anything I had left, I could spend on myself.
I was saving for a computer. I truly wanted an Atari 400 computer, but Coleco captivated me with the pack-in game of Donkey Kong and the promise of bringing the arcade experience home. They delivered. I was in, hook, line and sinker.
Soon I was off to college and my free time was very limited between work and my studies. I finally had aquired an original 2 disc drive (no hard drive) IBM PC to play Rogue and other “free” games I could download from the University net.. oh and I used it for my studies as well (Lotus 123 and Word Perfect, Fortran and a bit of machine Language programming. Remember EDLIN.. I was an expert user). But, I did happen to walk in to Toy R Us one day a couple of years later and I saw a new system that captivated me. It only had 12 or so games available. I was interested in the Super Mario Bros game that came with it. However, I was concerned as I noticed that there was a huge downfall and glut of video games everywhere. The news was out that the video game fad was over. There were bins and bins full of Atari, Intellivision and Coleco games on clearance at all the major retailers, even non big retail chains had these bins. I recall seeing TI-99 and Vic 20 computers at the end caps on the aisle of my local grocery store for $69. It really did look like the end of an era. It was over, or so I thought. In the end, I decided to plunk down $80 for an NES system and was amazed all over again. My next purchase was Legend of Zelda and then Metroid. My oh my, this tickled my fancy all over again. But I had little time as I was fully engulfed in school and work.
Fast forward to 1989-1992…. So I am out of college and I’m working my engineering career.. a great job. Video games have somewhat faded into memory now for me. I still have all my games and consoles stored away, but I no longer played them. As it happened, my mother was visiting, while out on an errand, we passed a Goodwill which she wanted to stop and go in. These stores were usually pretty boring for me and as a kid, much of my clothing came from thrift stores. Looking around with my mom.. aisles of clothes and not much else of interest to me, just as I remembered when I was a child, I was bored. That is, until we got up to the register… and there, on the shelf behind the register was a stack of old Atari 2600 games and an Atari. Some games of which I had never seen before. Hmmm, 50 cents for each cartridge was what they wanted. So I bought all the ones I didn’t have and took them home to play. This brought back an avalanche of memories and nostalgia. From then on, almost daily, my commute home from work involved stopping at all the thrift stores along the way. Always looking for Atari games. It did't end there, however; I expanded to include Colecovision, Intellivision and I found a Vectrex in the electronics section for $6. The tag said it didn’t work. Hmm. I bought it, took it a home and it worked just fine. I suspect the employees couldn’t figure out how to hook it up to the antenna to test. But yeah, I was in it big time. Even picking up the odd Sega Genesis and NES games. But those didn't interest me as much as the older systems
Fast forward to 1997, I have all these games, stacks and stacks of them along with computers and multiple other game systems. More than I could ever play. I discovered the internet along the way and soon met up with friends with similar interests. All in it for the same nostalgic fun. We were all about the same age too… “Children from the Dawn of the Video Game Era”. We decided to have a yearly meeting that year. Which blossomed into the NorthWest Classic Games Enthusiast (NWCGE). Soon others from out of state were joining us every year as we partnered up with a vintage toy store in Seattle and held the annual Atari 2600 Championships. All great fun, but it was growing and becoming a great deal of work. We knew we had to expand or close shop. With marriage, child and career, I personally didn’t have the time to make it happen. However, good friends, eager and enthusiastic as they were, carried the torch and got sponsors and TV coverage (all a huge score for the hobby) and thus the Portland Retro Gaming Expo was born (Big shout out to Rick Weis, President/founder of the event), one of the largest gaming expos in the nation. I attended other expos as well over the years and between them all, I have had the great fortune to meet many founders, heroes and celebrities in the industry over the years. Among the many include David Crane (Mr Activision,, Pitfall), Howard Scott Warshaw (Yars Revenge, ET fame), Don Bluth (Dragons Lair), Steve Wozniak (yes, Mr Apple II), Nolan Bushnell (Founder of Atari), Ralph Baer (The first true commercial home video game pioneer and some would say, the inventor of video games), the bulk of the Intellivsion programmers who worked for Mattel back in the day and the list goes on and on and on. I am fortunate to live nearby Joe Decuir and call him a friend of mine (Co-designer of the Atari 2600, 400/800 and Amiga Computers). All this is a childhood dream come true.
And now, here I am in my late 50’s and yes, I still play the modern systems, and yes the old games are pale in comparison from a graphics standpoint. But, I still love to grab a joystick, paddle or keypad controller from yesteryear and relive some of that fun… always shooting for that Hi-Score (Listen you youngsters. Before trophies and achievements we strived to reach the Hi-Score List. You earned bragging rights back in the day, especially when stopping by the mini mart after school and showing your friends that you were on the "board" and egged them on to try and beat your score). The newer generation has discovered the magic of classic video games too. Hipsters, geeks and even old guys publish new games for the old systems and talk about them continuously on the likes of YouTube and Podcasts. It's here to stay. There has been numerous documentaries (some of which I’ve had the pleasure to participate in) on the subject of classic/retro/vintage video games. Soo, like my grandparents before me, who got to witness, experience and live in era of the dawn of flight, I too, have lived to see something special. It’s a funny thing to know that computing power over the years was mainly driven by the passion to play video games. The future... who knows?!? We’ve come far and fast since the digital age began. As for me, I will have those blessed memories of seeing the first digital dots being displayed and controlled by key presses on my calculator and then by paddle on the family TV (many times in the back bedroom on a black and white TV). This is a feeling that I cannot describe and a feeling that younger folks these days probably have no concept of, as this technology is woven into the very fabric of their lives when they are born. Oh how I long for a time machine to take me back to those days spent in the sporting goods department of Sears, mesmerized by the feel of the joystick and the colors of blocks moving across the screen with simple digital sounds (beeps and burps).. my imagination running wild that I was driving a tank, flying a plane or driving a car; geez, the possibilities were endless. I didn't know it then, but I was at the dawn of a new era. Those were the days. Game on friends.
