Gamer

         Ok, so I missed another day. After work I came home, had supper, and then my daughter and I went shopping for a new laptop. Rather, she went laptop shopping while I wandered around BestBuy.

This is definitely not one of my favorite places, though I suppose it has its uses.

I spent a little bit of time glancing at e-readers, thinking about upgrading my Kindle. I could have looked at iPads, but I know that I can’t afford one so why bother? I also checked out some DVDs, but didn’t find anything interesting.

Then came the video games. I have a Wii and decided to see if I could find a game that appealed to me. So I wandered up and down aisles, past Xbox, PS3, and who knows what else. I had no idea there were so many different systems. Of course, I started to think about the history of video games.

Summer break, 1973. I had just completed my sophomore year of college and we took a family vacation to Hawaii. That in itself is probably worth an entry. My mom, dad, brother, and me — we left my little sister with an aunt and uncle since my parents felt she was too young to appreciate the trip and she hasn’t let us forget it since. But it was more than that: Gammy, Pappy, my dad’s cousins and their kids, 20+ family members. While we were there, we stayed on Oahu, did the tourist stuff, went to the beach and shows. But we also spent quite a bit of time at the hotel pool. We took up most of a floor of that hotel — whose name completely escapes me.

The one thing I do remember about the hotel is that it had a video game — the first that any of us had ever seen. We spent lots of coins in that machine and by the time we left there, most of the younger members of our traveling party were addicted to Pong.

It’s silly to think that such a simple game could attract our attention: back and forth, a little speck of light bouncing from one side of the screen to the other.

   

When we returned home, no more video games — at least for a while. Fortunately for me, when I returned to college that fall, the Gedunk (our student union and my favorite place during those years — unless you counted the theater) had a Pong console. My finances improved a few months later when they traded it for a Tank game. After all, who wants to play Tank?

And. . . 1975, Atari issued a home edition and guess who had one?

 

         Nobody else I knew had a video game system, so our living room was a popular place to be. Really. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it? A crowd of people watching and waiting for our turns to play Pong. One game and only one game, but it was all we had and we craved it.

At least until the next best thing came along.