As much as I wanted to like video games, I was never very good at them. I much preferred puzzle games. King’s Quest and Myst come to mind for early computer games. I also really liked the N64 and Wii Zelda games.
We always got the latest video game system growing up. I still have them, with all the games we owned. Pong, Atari 2600, all the Nintendo systems. They still work if you can get them hooked up to a modern TV.
Nowadays, though, you can get an Everdrive emulator cartridge for old systems and then get a 32GB microSD card from Eternal Retro Gaming. We have this setup for my old N64, and for about $150, we can play any game ever made for Nintendo consoles and Gameboys up through the N64 era. All on a tiny 32GB card. Crazy.
Playing games where you are trying to simulate reality with a limited hand controller on a 2D screen never appealed much to me. I preferred the older games where the on screen action was an abstraction better suited to the medium and the limited controls.
Probably just an illustration of the fact my brain and dexterity can't handle the newer stuff.
Having to remember what [bottom, lol] button to push and what direction just to do a jump or a kick ... mimicking natural movements with unnatural controls doesn't appeal. I'd much rather pretend I'm moving a toy plane/spaceship if you give me a joystick ...
The only modern game I've tried to play is Portal. Our oldest son tried to coach me through it. But I realized from the moment I picked up the controller that the last controller I'd held in my hands had ONE joystick and ONE button.
Still, I was having a pretty good time until I got to a hard level where I kept dying. I was willing to stick with it and do it as many times as necessary to complete the level, but our son ran out of patience and grabbed the controller and did it 'for me.' That was the end of the fun for me. It is still something of a sore point between me and him that he ruined my fun.
I tried watching our son play Halo and the movement made me car sick. If I was handling the controls I didn't have that issue, but watching I could only do in short sessions.
Gears of War is the only modern “shoot em up” game I like. The controls and action weren’t as chaotic, but I still wasn’t very good at it. Made for a good study break with my roommate during pharmacy school, though.
Good memory. I need to look up our first console as I know Atari was a lead player but my Dad had an eye for off brands; my first home stereo console was a Samsung before most people had heard of them
Skee ball, or as we kids always called it, skeet ball, was more my thing. And pinball. When my parents and I went on winter vacation to this place in the Pocanos, before dinner they would sit at the bar drinking a cocktail and send me (well supplied with quarters) to the kids' place, where I'd perform feats of wizardry.
As children, my cousins and I played Monopoly, Clue, and Chinese Checkers, and card games like Go Fish and War. Later, backgammon.
Is this the sort of thing you mean? Video games are beyond me.
(After dinner, sometimes this place in the Poconos had entertainment; once, The Amazing Kreskin performed. I have a photograph of him and my mother on stage each holding one end of a rope, Mom dressed in a pretty winter outfit. He actually was amazing. Good old days.)
My wife loves Clue and absolutely despises Monopoly. I recently taught my son how to play War, and he wants to play all the time now.
We always used to play a board game called The Christmas Game. Once the kids got old enough, my mom found it and started bringing it back out every Christmas. They loved it so much, she and my sister found another copy somewhere and gave it to us for Christmas one year. The kids still love it.
I also have fond memories of playing Rumikub and Bupkiss with my mom and her parents when they would come to visit.
We played Monopoly at a New Year's gathering with two 12-year-old boys, two men, and two women. I usually lose big in Monopoly, but this time my partner and I bought everything we could, went bankrupt a few times, but still won.
Beautiful area. We passed through on way home from Gettysburg, espied women and girls in long dresses bending in the fields and men in brimmed hats ploughing behind teams of four mules. Lancaster a nice town; but too hot -- 103 degrees F. -- to linger.
In my origin family it’s dominos (Mexican train), 6 can play and the competition during holidays is so much fun. Cribbage is also great for less players.
As teenager we played a lot of Axis & Allies board game which is like WW2 risk.
As for video games, I always like to watch more than play. In 80’s we had Commodore 64 then 128, and used to rent games (floppy disks) from game store.
Legacy of the Ancients was fun. So was Summer Games (Olympics) and Castle Wolfenstien.
My friends and family are devotees of Rummikub. I practiced online before I dared to join them. It has a few things in common with rummy, using 106 tiles, and the opportunity to rearrange the board.
There was a video arcade on Boylston St in Boston, right across the street from the Public Garden, the year after I got out of college. It was between my office and my brother’s dental school, and we’d go there at lunchtime every once in a while.
There was a guy there we called “Tommy” because he was a little weird (we’d say “neurodivergent”, these days) and he was amazing on every machine, kind of like a pinball wizard.
Tailgunner was a space game where you had to keep spaceships and fighters from passing your ship, and it was the first game I ever saw with multiple targets and increasing difficulty.
And there was Ryan's video games in Newport RI where we dispatched my two younger sons while entertaining their sisters who attended URI. They would play video games for hours, accumulate tickets and trade them for plastic junk prizes. Great memories. Know it? How's the reno going? I owe you a call.
The very first video game that I ever played was the old "Pong" game. You know, the one that was a CRT screen in black and white, one player only, and only found in bars. Later, when the full-sized arcade games came out, I would drop a couple of quarters into a game featuring killer robots whenever I visited my local 7/11.
Remember the old video game arcades? I loved looking around and soaking in all of the sounds and bright lights, but I never got too interested in playing. I felt that the games were there to make a fool of me by soaking up my pocket change. I was correct!
Raising the drinking age to 21 remains one of the dumber societal moves in recent years. You're too irresponsible to drink at 18 but ok to vote. Got it.
I vaguely remember being able to allow "servicemen" to buy a drink if they were under the age of twenty-one. This was many years ago when I was a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines. If they had a military ID, we could serve them alcohol. Of course, we never charged them. They were compted. On the flight report we had to account for all alcoholic beverages, and turn in any cash at the next station. We would write "compted" by Captain. It was standard operating procedure.
I can't say enough how much I love this post, thank you. I'm ex-military and I used to travel the world for work in the past, a lot. When I would end up in a restaurant or bar in a far away place where our service members were also enjoying themselves I would always silently pay the bartender or host for them. Sometimes they figured it out, sometimes they didn't, it didn't matter because they're owed that. Most citizens in this country don't realize how fast it goes from you're alive to your dead for our service members. Like I said they are owed that from each and every one of us. Thank you again for doing your part Mary.
Ahhh...your comment warmed my heart. The pilots could pick out the servicemen in every bar, because they were all ex-military. I remember going out with the entire crew to a bar when we were laying over in Charleston, SC. . The captain told us, "See those "fellas" over there? They have been down in submarines for awhile. Why don't you girls go over there and ask them to dance." We didn't hesitate. What a great time we had dancing the night away, and drinking with those "fellas." Everyone had a great time! I was, maybe, all of twenty-three years old myself. Thank you, for your service, and may God bless you.
Then again, it's questionable whether the Australian alternative, essentially giving you a driver's license and legal drinking permission at the same time, is any better.
Oooo one of my favorite topics! Some of my favorites back in the day were Galaga, Centipede, Phoenix, and Dig Dug. On Atari it was Pitfall and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On my Commodore 64, it was International Karate and Space Taxi. I skipped the whole Nintendo era in the 90s while in college and picked it back up when the graphics got a lot better in Half Life on PC. After that, I got into the Far Cry series and the other famous Ubisoft series, Assassin's Creed. Other favorites are the Elder Scrolls (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, and recently, the Yakuza series. I know some people think it's a juvenile but I find it endlessly fun and a good way to blow off the stress from work.
When I was a kid, I had a Commodore 64 and took a programming class at the Y. I was obsessed with programming and would spend hours typing in the code for a video game from the pages of Compute magazine. I wanted to design video games, but they didn't have any specialized programs when I went to college (1987 - 1991), so I majored in Computer Science. Well, that turned out to not be quite what I imagined, and though I loved programming, I was more interested in designing and writing a storyline, so I ended up dropping out. Anyway, I still enjoy programming and video games as a hobby, and think it was probably a blessing in disguise that I didn't go into either one as a career. Might have ruined the fun.
We used to go to Big Lots with my dad and buy Atari games for $1. Moon Patrol was one of my favorites. A friend down the street had Pitfall, and I loved it mostly because I didn’t have it. I ended up picking it up somewhere later in life and still have it, although I have no idea how to play it anymore.
You missed out on some great games during the Nintendo era. Battletoads, Contra, Kirby, Super Mario World, Mario Kart, Donkey Kong Country. Good times.
Haha! No but I did watch that documentary. I can't remember, were all those unsold ET cartridges actually thrown in the dump or was that just an urban myth?
I remember how excited we were when Commodore 64 came out. Our older brothers had Vic-20 (cassette tape) computer and the c64 at the time was light years ahead!
The only video game I played was tennis on an Atari. Only a few times because it wasn’t my system. I’m a crossword person. Every day on paper and with a pencil. On my IPad I play bubble shooter and scrabble. Scrabble is the best game I think.
Confession: I’m not very good at Scrabble. I’ve concluded that the way my brain is wired for words doesn’t fit that paradigm. My most recent ex would play Wordle so when she’d ask for advice I’d always warn her and she’d always reply: that doesn’t make any sense. You have the biggest vocabulary of anyone naive ever met. Sad 😔 but true. However, I’m a ringer at Trivial Pursuit
I’ve been playing Scrabble since I was a child. Many good family memories playing that game. And it was my maternal grandmother that taught me my other favorite game…poker. Love to play cards.
My favorite game was Kings Quest 6 which I played when I was 12. Then it was Zelda a link to the past. I played off an an on over the years, but really got back into it after the birth of my 3rd son when I developed severe chronic pain.
We just got the Switch and played Zelda Breath of the Wild and I loved it. I would play while my son napped and the other kids were at school.
Turns out that gaming distracts the brain from pain and the hormones released during gaming actually reduces pain. So I started learning about pain science in addition to learning about how to manage my conditions, since doctors really don't help much with chronic pain except to prescribe opiates, muscle relaxers or Xanax. Some people need these meds to function so I'm not anti-medication, but I wouldn't take the risk not being fully present with young kids. I
still have pain, but I know how
to deal with it now and am much better than I was. Gaming helps, and I'm able to connect with my sons and model what healthy gaming looks like.
My son loves Mario Kart on the Switch. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a pretty great game, too. I love Zelda games, but haven’t played Breath of the Wild. I may have to get it for him.
My son and I would play all the Legos games together - hopping around and smashing things and laughing. I was always a gamer from a young age. Still am. My favorite was always Duke Nukem because it was 100% campy fun with no politically correct apologies.
I'm old school enough that I remember loving playing pinball machines. Hard to find them these days, but arcades sure had plenty. And for a while, I even had one at home. A real one.
When I was in college, though, the first thing we'd now call a "video game" was created. It was called "Space War," and to play it required a proto-joystick. The only actual joysticks then existence were in aircraft. This one was electronic and was referred to as "the kludge." It had a hemispherical plexiglass (or something similar), under which was quite a lot of analog-looking electronics. The screen was about a 6" CRT with ludicrously low resolution. But in the land of the blind....
Fast forward...no time for that in med school, or residency, but after that, games returned to my life. I very much liked doing procedures, like angiograms. And I got to be very good at them. By the early '80s, it took me a mere hour and a quarter to do an average cerebrovascular workup. That was quick back then, especially since digital imaging then was well into the future. But then I got Pac-Man for use on an Atari game unit. within 6 weeks, my average angiography time had fallen to 45 minutes--40% faster. And I wasn't hurrying--my eye-hand coordination had just improved that much that quickly. I hadn't expected it, but there it was.
I don't know how many hours I spent playing the Zork series, but it's easily a three-digit number if not 4. Zork was made by a defunct company, Infocom, which made many text-based games. In each, you had to solve various puzzles, many of which were ludicrously difficult--including Zork I's baseball referenced puzzle. Without the hints booklets--available for a fee, but with the handy invisible ink feature so you couldn't accidentally see things that you didn't really want to see. Yet.
But text-based games eventually faded to visual versions of them. Myst and the Journeyman Project series--especially Buried In Time--were wonderful. The visuals on them were and are dazzlingly beautiful. They evoke synesthetic sensations. And they're certainly not trivial to solve--at least for me.
I might even resume misspending my youth....
And this doesn't even begin talking about flight simulators. Turns out they're great training for actual flying. It's much harder to fly--and land--a simulator than an actual plane. And a whole lot less expensive.
Pinball has made a huge comeback, so many good games nowadays and tournaments going on. I played every year at Pinburgh (in Pittsburgh), where they had almost every game from every era there. Some of my favorites are Metallica, AC/DC, Elvira's Scared Stiff, and the new John Wick. I have an older Gottlieb in my basement called Genesis, kind of a knockoff on a Frankenstein theme. If you're interested in playing, there's a cool app called the Pinball Map that locates all the machines near you or in cities where you might be traveling.
I lived in Pittsburgh for quite a while. And my wife still lies there, so I'm there every couple months. Where is Pinburgh?
One of my faves was Space Ride, which, if memory serves, was among the first digital pinball games. But the electromechanical ones were great fun, too. Gotta have the sounds to make the whole experience.
Back in the day, there was also a neat piece of software called Pinball Construction Set. You could design--and play!!--your own virtual pinball game. But since it was on a computer, there was limit to how much "English" you could use. You could tilt it, though.
Thanks for the tip about where to find machines. Just put it on my iPhone. I didn't know how many places there are near me.
Oh wow cool that your wife lives here! I'm in Forest Hills. They shut down Pinburgh for COVID (it got so big they had it in the convention center in downtown) but it came back last year and I played in the women's tournament. It was much smaller but still fun. They held it at Rezzanine Esports in Bridgeville. It's there again this year, last weekend in July, but I forgot to get tickets and they sell out in a matter of minutes. You can get on a wait list though, in case someone cancels. Here's the link to the info: https://pinburgh.com/2025/main.html
There's a cool brewery out here in Pitcairn that I usually go to on Saturdays called Wye Brewery, if you're ever in town. They have about 20 machines and have tournaments on the last Saturday of the month. There's also a huge place on the South side called Pins Mechanical. They have a ton of games there plus duckpin bowling, super fun place to go with a group. Also Kickback Cafe in Lawrenceville has quite a few and usually has small tournaments and multiple leagues.
She lived on Cascade Drive in FH for a few years, but has lived in Highland Park since ‘84.
I now live in Birmingham, aka the Pittsburgh of the south. They’re pretty much sister cities in a number of ways—same steel industry until ‘81, then university/medical started driving the economy.
Big diff is the politics: Bham area is as conservative as the ‘Burgh isn’t. We’re both pretty conservative, so I’m cautiously optimistic that sooner or later I’ll get her to sell the house and move down here.
The guys I know who got to be really good also sometimes admit that they did things like play video or other eye-hand games. Ultimately, what I did before I stopped doing surgery was like a very high-stakes video game. Biggest delta is that a “life” has quite a different meaning between the two.
Someone once asked me why I did neurointervention. I told him that, if I were independently wealthy and they charged for doing it,I’d lay to be allowed to do so. Recalling the very first case I did, I instantly understood what addiction was like. I knew I had found what I was going to do with my life. And I never regretted it.
High school, early 70's. Saturday night the arcade was packed with gamers. After a big rain we gathered up a few thousand small frogs from a pond, wrapped them in a cloth, opened the front door and tossed them in, liberating them. The mayhem was more fun than any of those games
I think it’s a category distinction between the three. I’m sure most kids learned Old Maid, Go Fish, then later Solitaire, War, and finally the gambling oriented ones. I had weekly poker games in both high school and law school.
The closest I ever came to being addicted to a video game was "Centipede" back in the early '80s. In the '90s I discovered The Legend of Zelda - great game!
Sim City! I had an ex who played the Sims. She created a character based on me and the guy wouldn’t do anything productive, just lay around all day (and he didn’t even write poems!)
My favorite arcade game ever was something called Defender. Some guys got real good it and got to the higher levels (not me.)
As a kid my family would go with my cousins to Hampton Beach NH and cram into a cottage. I was given 10 cents each night to go to the arcades. We found pinball games we could beat and just play free games all night. Of course you had to win the first time or you were out of luck for the night.
Loved Defender too but it was so hard! I would usually die very quickly. Did you ever watch News Radio with Dave Foley and Phil Hartman? Hilarious show, but there was one episode where they installed a Defender machine in the hallway and Dave gets obsessed with beating it.
Celia's piece on the old video games. allow me to offer full disclosure as to what an idiot I truly am. I recall reading a book while commuting to NYC on the Long Island Railroad that would have changed my life and made me a multi-millionaire many times over. It was called "The Micro Millennium" by Christopher Evans, published in 1980. In it, Evans uncannily predicted the rise of the computer, which he said would begin with people first getting familiar with tech through games such as Pong and Space Invaders. ( I well remember that long ago Christmas, passing houses and hearing the pounding sounds of that video game on countless tv's.) That would progress to desk tops, laptops, interconnectivity and ultimately AI. While I found the book insightful and fascinating, did I even consider making big bets on tech? Why, no, I did not. Here was the blueprint in my hands, yet I failed to connect it to real life on so many levels. Sort of like my youngest, a video game enthusiast, who is very computer literate, was an early user of bitcoin, yet left several nascent bitcoins on an abandoned computer. Not sure what message I'm sending on this wet Saturday morning, but we humans are strange creatures, are we not?
When I made my first purchase on AbeBooks.com, a replacement for a book on the Delphic Oracle that I'd lent to someone and never got back, and then my second, a copy of Further Adventures of Lad, published by Grosset & Dunlap, which I probably left in a book box I unloaded after a move, I should have realized that purchasing stock in AbeBooks or Amazon would be a good thing.
(Laddie! I said aloud when I opened the package. Same book jacket.)
After all, if a tech dummy like me was using a particular tech, it was a cinch to make money. This was circa 1997.
Had a small windfall in early 90’s, instead of blowing it I bought 1000 shares of Dell. Sold it after a year or so after a 2 for 1 split, not cuz I needed the money, but I thought taking the money and seeding a 529 for my newborn son was a good idea
Dell was at UT same time I was. People pointed him out on campus saying “that guy is building a computer in his dorm” while I sat under a tree reading and writing poetry. Obviously his life’s work was slightly more remunerative though it does show how early in life some people’s paths are set.
I was at a “mini-MBA” training program in 1999 and one of our assignments was a Harvard Business School case study on this new company called Amazon.com. We were supposed to analyze their business plan and predict whether they’d be successful. I forget what our team concluded, though.
Loved Space Invaders. Don’t kick yourself; I’ve been ahead of tons of trends and in my mind lost fortunes. A friend knew the guy who founded Quicksilver and told me it was going public, could have doubted my money in a week. Too slow and dull to act.
Well, *this* strange creature sold all his Apple shares the month before the iPod was released. Not sure where that ranks in the annals of dipshittery, but it still stings a bit.
Early in our marriage, while the world was still recovering from 2008, my wife and I came across a nearby lakefront property with a small cabin on it for $40,000. We seriously debated buying it, but we were young and broke and eventually decided against it. So much regret.
As much as I wanted to like video games, I was never very good at them. I much preferred puzzle games. King’s Quest and Myst come to mind for early computer games. I also really liked the N64 and Wii Zelda games.
We always got the latest video game system growing up. I still have them, with all the games we owned. Pong, Atari 2600, all the Nintendo systems. They still work if you can get them hooked up to a modern TV.
Nowadays, though, you can get an Everdrive emulator cartridge for old systems and then get a 32GB microSD card from Eternal Retro Gaming. We have this setup for my old N64, and for about $150, we can play any game ever made for Nintendo consoles and Gameboys up through the N64 era. All on a tiny 32GB card. Crazy.
https://krikzz.com/
https://eternalretro.com/product/nintendo-64-n64-game-collection-everdrive/
Myst was a stunningly good game.
It was. I remember it being so difficult as a kid. I’ll have to look it up now that I’m older and see what I think.
My youngest son tried to get me involved in Call of Duty, etc., but the games just made me dizzy and nauseated.
Playing games where you are trying to simulate reality with a limited hand controller on a 2D screen never appealed much to me. I preferred the older games where the on screen action was an abstraction better suited to the medium and the limited controls.
Probably just an illustration of the fact my brain and dexterity can't handle the newer stuff.
Agree. Too much action and wild POV shifts
Having to remember what [bottom, lol] button to push and what direction just to do a jump or a kick ... mimicking natural movements with unnatural controls doesn't appeal. I'd much rather pretend I'm moving a toy plane/spaceship if you give me a joystick ...
Or Pac-Man
And how about the virtual reality games where you donned a helmet?
Crichton was a genius....so ahead of his time.
I never played a helmet game. Crichton is great.
I do love laser tag.
The only modern game I've tried to play is Portal. Our oldest son tried to coach me through it. But I realized from the moment I picked up the controller that the last controller I'd held in my hands had ONE joystick and ONE button.
Still, I was having a pretty good time until I got to a hard level where I kept dying. I was willing to stick with it and do it as many times as necessary to complete the level, but our son ran out of patience and grabbed the controller and did it 'for me.' That was the end of the fun for me. It is still something of a sore point between me and him that he ruined my fun.
I tried watching our son play Halo and the movement made me car sick. If I was handling the controls I didn't have that issue, but watching I could only do in short sessions.
Gears of War is the only modern “shoot em up” game I like. The controls and action weren’t as chaotic, but I still wasn’t very good at it. Made for a good study break with my roommate during pharmacy school, though.
"64k is enough for anybody"
--William Gates
Good memory. I need to look up our first console as I know Atari was a lead player but my Dad had an eye for off brands; my first home stereo console was a Samsung before most people had heard of them
Skee ball, or as we kids always called it, skeet ball, was more my thing. And pinball. When my parents and I went on winter vacation to this place in the Pocanos, before dinner they would sit at the bar drinking a cocktail and send me (well supplied with quarters) to the kids' place, where I'd perform feats of wizardry.
As children, my cousins and I played Monopoly, Clue, and Chinese Checkers, and card games like Go Fish and War. Later, backgammon.
Is this the sort of thing you mean? Video games are beyond me.
(After dinner, sometimes this place in the Poconos had entertainment; once, The Amazing Kreskin performed. I have a photograph of him and my mother on stage each holding one end of a rope, Mom dressed in a pretty winter outfit. He actually was amazing. Good old days.)
My wife loves Clue and absolutely despises Monopoly. I recently taught my son how to play War, and he wants to play all the time now.
We always used to play a board game called The Christmas Game. Once the kids got old enough, my mom found it and started bringing it back out every Christmas. They loved it so much, she and my sister found another copy somewhere and gave it to us for Christmas one year. The kids still love it.
I also have fond memories of playing Rumikub and Bupkiss with my mom and her parents when they would come to visit.
Clue! Mr Mustard in the study with a candlestick
We played Monopoly at a New Year's gathering with two 12-year-old boys, two men, and two women. I usually lose big in Monopoly, but this time my partner and I bought everything we could, went bankrupt a few times, but still won.
Wish I had learned this lesson decades ago.
I remember those stacks of quarters well.
My parents took us to a place called Host Farm in Lancaster, PA.
The game room was the rage.
Beautiful area. We passed through on way home from Gettysburg, espied women and girls in long dresses bending in the fields and men in brimmed hats ploughing behind teams of four mules. Lancaster a nice town; but too hot -- 103 degrees F. -- to linger.
We spent most of the time in the swimming pool.
It was very hot.
Board games are a different topic. Monopoly, The Game of Life, Trouble, Operation, chess and checkers….
Life! That was the other one. Thanks.
I preferred Risk and Trivial Pursuit.
In my origin family it’s dominos (Mexican train), 6 can play and the competition during holidays is so much fun. Cribbage is also great for less players.
As teenager we played a lot of Axis & Allies board game which is like WW2 risk.
As for video games, I always like to watch more than play. In 80’s we had Commodore 64 then 128, and used to rent games (floppy disks) from game store.
Legacy of the Ancients was fun. So was Summer Games (Olympics) and Castle Wolfenstien.
Ah the original Wolfenstein was great.
My friends and family are devotees of Rummikub. I practiced online before I dared to join them. It has a few things in common with rummy, using 106 tiles, and the opportunity to rearrange the board.
I've always loved skee ball, and I will still play it whenever I get the chance.
War was always my favorite card game.
“Tailgunner”
There was a video arcade on Boylston St in Boston, right across the street from the Public Garden, the year after I got out of college. It was between my office and my brother’s dental school, and we’d go there at lunchtime every once in a while.
There was a guy there we called “Tommy” because he was a little weird (we’d say “neurodivergent”, these days) and he was amazing on every machine, kind of like a pinball wizard.
Tailgunner was a space game where you had to keep spaceships and fighters from passing your ship, and it was the first game I ever saw with multiple targets and increasing difficulty.
And there was Ryan's video games in Newport RI where we dispatched my two younger sons while entertaining their sisters who attended URI. They would play video games for hours, accumulate tickets and trade them for plastic junk prizes. Great memories. Know it? How's the reno going? I owe you a call.
Tommy 😂
How do you think he does? What makes him so good? Lol 😆
The very first video game that I ever played was the old "Pong" game. You know, the one that was a CRT screen in black and white, one player only, and only found in bars. Later, when the full-sized arcade games came out, I would drop a couple of quarters into a game featuring killer robots whenever I visited my local 7/11.
Remember the old video game arcades? I loved looking around and soaking in all of the sounds and bright lights, but I never got too interested in playing. I felt that the games were there to make a fool of me by soaking up my pocket change. I was correct!
I played "Pong" in a bar in college. The drinking age in Florida back in the 1970s was eighteen. Pitchers of beer were $1!
Raising the drinking age to 21 remains one of the dumber societal moves in recent years. You're too irresponsible to drink at 18 but ok to vote. Got it.
And enlist. How unfair. :-/
I vaguely remember being able to allow "servicemen" to buy a drink if they were under the age of twenty-one. This was many years ago when I was a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines. If they had a military ID, we could serve them alcohol. Of course, we never charged them. They were compted. On the flight report we had to account for all alcoholic beverages, and turn in any cash at the next station. We would write "compted" by Captain. It was standard operating procedure.
I can't say enough how much I love this post, thank you. I'm ex-military and I used to travel the world for work in the past, a lot. When I would end up in a restaurant or bar in a far away place where our service members were also enjoying themselves I would always silently pay the bartender or host for them. Sometimes they figured it out, sometimes they didn't, it didn't matter because they're owed that. Most citizens in this country don't realize how fast it goes from you're alive to your dead for our service members. Like I said they are owed that from each and every one of us. Thank you again for doing your part Mary.
Ahhh...your comment warmed my heart. The pilots could pick out the servicemen in every bar, because they were all ex-military. I remember going out with the entire crew to a bar when we were laying over in Charleston, SC. . The captain told us, "See those "fellas" over there? They have been down in submarines for awhile. Why don't you girls go over there and ask them to dance." We didn't hesitate. What a great time we had dancing the night away, and drinking with those "fellas." Everyone had a great time! I was, maybe, all of twenty-three years old myself. Thank you, for your service, and may God bless you.
And join the Army.
Then again, it's questionable whether the Australian alternative, essentially giving you a driver's license and legal drinking permission at the same time, is any better.
The requirement for money made them a pleasant but occasional indulgence.
Oooo one of my favorite topics! Some of my favorites back in the day were Galaga, Centipede, Phoenix, and Dig Dug. On Atari it was Pitfall and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On my Commodore 64, it was International Karate and Space Taxi. I skipped the whole Nintendo era in the 90s while in college and picked it back up when the graphics got a lot better in Half Life on PC. After that, I got into the Far Cry series and the other famous Ubisoft series, Assassin's Creed. Other favorites are the Elder Scrolls (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, and recently, the Yakuza series. I know some people think it's a juvenile but I find it endlessly fun and a good way to blow off the stress from work.
When I was a kid, I had a Commodore 64 and took a programming class at the Y. I was obsessed with programming and would spend hours typing in the code for a video game from the pages of Compute magazine. I wanted to design video games, but they didn't have any specialized programs when I went to college (1987 - 1991), so I majored in Computer Science. Well, that turned out to not be quite what I imagined, and though I loved programming, I was more interested in designing and writing a storyline, so I ended up dropping out. Anyway, I still enjoy programming and video games as a hobby, and think it was probably a blessing in disguise that I didn't go into either one as a career. Might have ruined the fun.
I'm finally playing the Witcher 3 now. It's great!
It's SO GOOD!!! I love playing random games of Gwent, and it's so cool how all your choices affect the ending you get...beware!!!
Choices affecting the ending sounds like Mass Effect. That was a fun game.
Oh Mass Effect!!! Another amazing series!!!
We used to go to Big Lots with my dad and buy Atari games for $1. Moon Patrol was one of my favorites. A friend down the street had Pitfall, and I loved it mostly because I didn’t have it. I ended up picking it up somewhere later in life and still have it, although I have no idea how to play it anymore.
You missed out on some great games during the Nintendo era. Battletoads, Contra, Kirby, Super Mario World, Mario Kart, Donkey Kong Country. Good times.
Oh yeah! I loved Moon Patrol! LOLOL Battletoads? I'll need to look that up now.
Battletoads had the best pause music. Great sound effects overall.
Did you ever play ET for the Atari? I finally understood why I hated that game so much when I watched Atari: Game Over.
Haha! No but I did watch that documentary. I can't remember, were all those unsold ET cartridges actually thrown in the dump or was that just an urban myth?
That’s a great documentary on this topic
It’s been a while since I watched it, but I’m pretty sure they found them.
Galaga and Centipede were my favorites.
I wish I’d followed that last line advice about music. Your memory is sharp. Centipede and Dig Dug
I remember how excited we were when Commodore 64 came out. Our older brothers had Vic-20 (cassette tape) computer and the c64 at the time was light years ahead!
Haha! Yeah we had the Vic 20 for a couple years before the Commodore 64 and you're right... light years ahead!!
The only video game I played was tennis on an Atari. Only a few times because it wasn’t my system. I’m a crossword person. Every day on paper and with a pencil. On my IPad I play bubble shooter and scrabble. Scrabble is the best game I think.
Have you ever played Wordscapes on the iPad? It’s fun.
Wordscapes is my “go to” for the long waits in doctors’ offices because it’s engaging, and can be played without WiFi or cell phone signal.
No maybe I’ll give it a try
Confession: I’m not very good at Scrabble. I’ve concluded that the way my brain is wired for words doesn’t fit that paradigm. My most recent ex would play Wordle so when she’d ask for advice I’d always warn her and she’d always reply: that doesn’t make any sense. You have the biggest vocabulary of anyone naive ever met. Sad 😔 but true. However, I’m a ringer at Trivial Pursuit
I’ve been playing Scrabble since I was a child. Many good family memories playing that game. And it was my maternal grandmother that taught me my other favorite game…poker. Love to play cards.
My favorite game was Kings Quest 6 which I played when I was 12. Then it was Zelda a link to the past. I played off an an on over the years, but really got back into it after the birth of my 3rd son when I developed severe chronic pain.
We just got the Switch and played Zelda Breath of the Wild and I loved it. I would play while my son napped and the other kids were at school.
Turns out that gaming distracts the brain from pain and the hormones released during gaming actually reduces pain. So I started learning about pain science in addition to learning about how to manage my conditions, since doctors really don't help much with chronic pain except to prescribe opiates, muscle relaxers or Xanax. Some people need these meds to function so I'm not anti-medication, but I wouldn't take the risk not being fully present with young kids. I
still have pain, but I know how
to deal with it now and am much better than I was. Gaming helps, and I'm able to connect with my sons and model what healthy gaming looks like.
My son loves Mario Kart on the Switch. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a pretty great game, too. I love Zelda games, but haven’t played Breath of the Wild. I may have to get it for him.
BOTW is amazing! The sequel is Tears of the Kingdom, which was good but not as good as BOTW.
My son and I would play all the Legos games together - hopping around and smashing things and laughing. I was always a gamer from a young age. Still am. My favorite was always Duke Nukem because it was 100% campy fun with no politically correct apologies.
I'm old school enough that I remember loving playing pinball machines. Hard to find them these days, but arcades sure had plenty. And for a while, I even had one at home. A real one.
When I was in college, though, the first thing we'd now call a "video game" was created. It was called "Space War," and to play it required a proto-joystick. The only actual joysticks then existence were in aircraft. This one was electronic and was referred to as "the kludge." It had a hemispherical plexiglass (or something similar), under which was quite a lot of analog-looking electronics. The screen was about a 6" CRT with ludicrously low resolution. But in the land of the blind....
Fast forward...no time for that in med school, or residency, but after that, games returned to my life. I very much liked doing procedures, like angiograms. And I got to be very good at them. By the early '80s, it took me a mere hour and a quarter to do an average cerebrovascular workup. That was quick back then, especially since digital imaging then was well into the future. But then I got Pac-Man for use on an Atari game unit. within 6 weeks, my average angiography time had fallen to 45 minutes--40% faster. And I wasn't hurrying--my eye-hand coordination had just improved that much that quickly. I hadn't expected it, but there it was.
I don't know how many hours I spent playing the Zork series, but it's easily a three-digit number if not 4. Zork was made by a defunct company, Infocom, which made many text-based games. In each, you had to solve various puzzles, many of which were ludicrously difficult--including Zork I's baseball referenced puzzle. Without the hints booklets--available for a fee, but with the handy invisible ink feature so you couldn't accidentally see things that you didn't really want to see. Yet.
But text-based games eventually faded to visual versions of them. Myst and the Journeyman Project series--especially Buried In Time--were wonderful. The visuals on them were and are dazzlingly beautiful. They evoke synesthetic sensations. And they're certainly not trivial to solve--at least for me.
I might even resume misspending my youth....
And this doesn't even begin talking about flight simulators. Turns out they're great training for actual flying. It's much harder to fly--and land--a simulator than an actual plane. And a whole lot less expensive.
Pinball has made a huge comeback, so many good games nowadays and tournaments going on. I played every year at Pinburgh (in Pittsburgh), where they had almost every game from every era there. Some of my favorites are Metallica, AC/DC, Elvira's Scared Stiff, and the new John Wick. I have an older Gottlieb in my basement called Genesis, kind of a knockoff on a Frankenstein theme. If you're interested in playing, there's a cool app called the Pinball Map that locates all the machines near you or in cities where you might be traveling.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pbm
I lived in Pittsburgh for quite a while. And my wife still lies there, so I'm there every couple months. Where is Pinburgh?
One of my faves was Space Ride, which, if memory serves, was among the first digital pinball games. But the electromechanical ones were great fun, too. Gotta have the sounds to make the whole experience.
Back in the day, there was also a neat piece of software called Pinball Construction Set. You could design--and play!!--your own virtual pinball game. But since it was on a computer, there was limit to how much "English" you could use. You could tilt it, though.
Thanks for the tip about where to find machines. Just put it on my iPhone. I didn't know how many places there are near me.
Oh wow cool that your wife lives here! I'm in Forest Hills. They shut down Pinburgh for COVID (it got so big they had it in the convention center in downtown) but it came back last year and I played in the women's tournament. It was much smaller but still fun. They held it at Rezzanine Esports in Bridgeville. It's there again this year, last weekend in July, but I forgot to get tickets and they sell out in a matter of minutes. You can get on a wait list though, in case someone cancels. Here's the link to the info: https://pinburgh.com/2025/main.html
There's a cool brewery out here in Pitcairn that I usually go to on Saturdays called Wye Brewery, if you're ever in town. They have about 20 machines and have tournaments on the last Saturday of the month. There's also a huge place on the South side called Pins Mechanical. They have a ton of games there plus duckpin bowling, super fun place to go with a group. Also Kickback Cafe in Lawrenceville has quite a few and usually has small tournaments and multiple leagues.
She lived on Cascade Drive in FH for a few years, but has lived in Highland Park since ‘84.
I now live in Birmingham, aka the Pittsburgh of the south. They’re pretty much sister cities in a number of ways—same steel industry until ‘81, then university/medical started driving the economy.
Big diff is the politics: Bham area is as conservative as the ‘Burgh isn’t. We’re both pretty conservative, so I’m cautiously optimistic that sooner or later I’ll get her to sell the house and move down here.
Thanks for the links to places in Pgh.
My six year older brother was the pinball guy. Think Dazed and Confused
That's wonderful news - I had no idea.
In MAD magazines of old, TILT referred to disorder, breakdown, general insanity.
I've heard of Space War but was too young to have experienced that one, must have been cool to see it when it first came out!!!
Oh, it was!
Wow! I’ve heard of pilots using video games to improve skill but never doctors.
The guys I know who got to be really good also sometimes admit that they did things like play video or other eye-hand games. Ultimately, what I did before I stopped doing surgery was like a very high-stakes video game. Biggest delta is that a “life” has quite a different meaning between the two.
Someone once asked me why I did neurointervention. I told him that, if I were independently wealthy and they charged for doing it,I’d lay to be allowed to do so. Recalling the very first case I did, I instantly understood what addiction was like. I knew I had found what I was going to do with my life. And I never regretted it.
Great topic bc it also embodies the American spirit to work hard, play hard. We were lucky kids to go to the arcade!
For video games, I loved playing marble madness. But loved the physical games like capture the flag. And of course, skee ball, pinball, air hockey…
I loved playing capture the flag (Scouts)!
Marble Madness! So I’m not the only one!
IKR!!!
Team Wordle or Quardle, anyone?
Also, MURDLE! It's the Wordle version of the board game Clue. Very fun!
I Wordle daily. I am not very good at Connections, though.
I love wordle!
If I'm feeling smart, I do a quardle.
Have you seen Murdle? It's the Wordle version of the game Clue! Quite fun!
Hmmmm.... no. I will have to look it up.
Ok — I need more coffee ☕️
The Lobster Quadrile? Lol
Try HURDLE —
The Turtle?
High school, early 70's. Saturday night the arcade was packed with gamers. After a big rain we gathered up a few thousand small frogs from a pond, wrapped them in a cloth, opened the front door and tossed them in, liberating them. The mayhem was more fun than any of those games
Because my parents thought reading was lazy, you can imagine their feelings about video games. We had none.
We did play cards as a family and I am pretty darn good at Euchre, Spades, Hearts, Pinochle and BlackJack.
My husband and I play in euchre tournaments in the winter. I much prefer cards or physical games over video games.
I think it’s a category distinction between the three. I’m sure most kids learned Old Maid, Go Fish, then later Solitaire, War, and finally the gambling oriented ones. I had weekly poker games in both high school and law school.
Whoa, your parents thought reading was lazy?!
Come to think of it, that might explain some things ....
J I’ve never had that thought expressed in my life.
Farm raised.
My dad was, I wasn't ....
Video games completely passed me by. And that dragon looks like a seahorse to me!
Euchre!
The closest I ever came to being addicted to a video game was "Centipede" back in the early '80s. In the '90s I discovered The Legend of Zelda - great game!
I loved Centipede. I could really make a quarter last on that. Didn’t have many quarters, so that was important.
Never a video game person. But I did play a lot of Sim City when that type of thing was new. My then b/f was a big computer nerd.
I never got into online stuff outside of Spider solitaire - no video games.
Sim City! I had an ex who played the Sims. She created a character based on me and the guy wouldn’t do anything productive, just lay around all day (and he didn’t even write poems!)
My favorite arcade game ever was something called Defender. Some guys got real good it and got to the higher levels (not me.)
As a kid my family would go with my cousins to Hampton Beach NH and cram into a cottage. I was given 10 cents each night to go to the arcades. We found pinball games we could beat and just play free games all night. Of course you had to win the first time or you were out of luck for the night.
I liked Defender. Also not very good. Limited dexterity and limited funds!
Loved Defender too but it was so hard! I would usually die very quickly. Did you ever watch News Radio with Dave Foley and Phil Hartman? Hilarious show, but there was one episode where they installed a Defender machine in the hallway and Dave gets obsessed with beating it.
Defender! Yes
Celia's piece on the old video games. allow me to offer full disclosure as to what an idiot I truly am. I recall reading a book while commuting to NYC on the Long Island Railroad that would have changed my life and made me a multi-millionaire many times over. It was called "The Micro Millennium" by Christopher Evans, published in 1980. In it, Evans uncannily predicted the rise of the computer, which he said would begin with people first getting familiar with tech through games such as Pong and Space Invaders. ( I well remember that long ago Christmas, passing houses and hearing the pounding sounds of that video game on countless tv's.) That would progress to desk tops, laptops, interconnectivity and ultimately AI. While I found the book insightful and fascinating, did I even consider making big bets on tech? Why, no, I did not. Here was the blueprint in my hands, yet I failed to connect it to real life on so many levels. Sort of like my youngest, a video game enthusiast, who is very computer literate, was an early user of bitcoin, yet left several nascent bitcoins on an abandoned computer. Not sure what message I'm sending on this wet Saturday morning, but we humans are strange creatures, are we not?
When I made my first purchase on AbeBooks.com, a replacement for a book on the Delphic Oracle that I'd lent to someone and never got back, and then my second, a copy of Further Adventures of Lad, published by Grosset & Dunlap, which I probably left in a book box I unloaded after a move, I should have realized that purchasing stock in AbeBooks or Amazon would be a good thing.
(Laddie! I said aloud when I opened the package. Same book jacket.)
After all, if a tech dummy like me was using a particular tech, it was a cinch to make money. This was circa 1997.
Welcome to the club
Had a small windfall in early 90’s, instead of blowing it I bought 1000 shares of Dell. Sold it after a year or so after a 2 for 1 split, not cuz I needed the money, but I thought taking the money and seeding a 529 for my newborn son was a good idea
I was wrong
Dell was at UT same time I was. People pointed him out on campus saying “that guy is building a computer in his dorm” while I sat under a tree reading and writing poetry. Obviously his life’s work was slightly more remunerative though it does show how early in life some people’s paths are set.
I was at a “mini-MBA” training program in 1999 and one of our assignments was a Harvard Business School case study on this new company called Amazon.com. We were supposed to analyze their business plan and predict whether they’d be successful. I forget what our team concluded, though.
Who would ever get rich selling books on line??
Anyone get an invite to the Venice wedding party?
Who would ever pay for water in a bottle?
Loved Space Invaders. Don’t kick yourself; I’ve been ahead of tons of trends and in my mind lost fortunes. A friend knew the guy who founded Quicksilver and told me it was going public, could have doubted my money in a week. Too slow and dull to act.
Well, *this* strange creature sold all his Apple shares the month before the iPod was released. Not sure where that ranks in the annals of dipshittery, but it still stings a bit.
I sold Sony stock right before they came out with the Sony "Walkman." I can't think about it...
I hear you, Mary!
Early in our marriage, while the world was still recovering from 2008, my wife and I came across a nearby lakefront property with a small cabin on it for $40,000. We seriously debated buying it, but we were young and broke and eventually decided against it. So much regret.