Vintage Video Games

Most kids today have grown up surrounded by video games and computers that put on dazzling displays of sight and sound. Internet games are available that draw people in so deeply that they spend entire days online playing and spend "real world" money to buy "gold" for their game play.

Children of the seventies and eighties can remember a simpler time. That was the dawn of the video game era. A time when seeing almost anything on the television screen that was actually under our control entertained us for hours and drove our parents just a little bit crazy.

This Hub will look at a couple of the first vintage video games and game systems that paved the way for today's video generation.

One of the first games many of us owned was Pong.  This simple game was a very simple console that connected to the back of the television.  When it was turned on , a black and white image would imerge from the dark screen and present two video "paddles" on one moving dot that served as the "ball" for the game.

Pong was sort of like tennis except that the paddles only moved up and down along the outer edge of the television screen.  The idea was to get your paddle in the way of the ball and make it bounce back toward the other player.  We loved it and played it for hours.  I don't think it would hold most kids' attention for that long today.

The next system many of us got our parents to buy was the Atari 2600.  You could actually change game cartridges on this amazing system.  A popular early game on the Atari was Space Invaders.  You can find newer versions of this today, but they don't have the same appeal as the old black and white original.  Our fingers were covered in callouses and blisters from jamming the joystick from side to side.

Later, more arcade games started to become available on the Atari.  I can remember saving up thirty five dollars to buy Missile Command at a time when that amount of money was a LOT more.  I still probably got my money's worth from it.  We played it constantly until it was mastered.

Activision came out with some very cool games for Atari a little while later and the graphics were notably better (but still pretty bad by today's standards).  Of these, Pitfall was far and away the favorite of my group of friends.

I didn't always have the latest and greatest of the video game systems.  Usually what happened was a rotation of sorts.  One friend would get the best new system for a birthday or Christmas and they would be the center of attention for a while.  One friend went from Atari to Intellivision to Colecovision in one straight run.  After that, things evened out a bit and we all started asking for, and receiving the latest systems.  If I recall correctly, things sort of slowed down right around the time the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out.  We all had our own consoles and we practiced and played against each other a lot.  It was a lot of wasted time I suppose, but it was fun.