In The Beginning...

Way back in the dark ages, I went over to a friend's house one Friday evening and he had something I had never seen the likes of. He had an original Sears Tele-Games PONG system. I will never forget controlling something on the screen that I was watching for the first time. We played PONG for a couple of hours.

It was truly and remarkably boring.

Fast forward  a couple of years. Christmas comes along and I receive Telstar Combat! Now this was something else. You didn't just bounce a block back and forth, you drove tanks and fired at your enemy! Well, they were a representation of tanks. Meaning it looked like two side lines and a longer line in the middle where a gun would be. Anyway you had 4 game variations (count 'em, 4!) and it came in a green plastic console with camo decals. Is that cool or what?

Don't answer that.

But with only 4 ways to drive my sticks around and blow the snot out of the other sticks, you tend to get bored again. And then along came the answer: the Atari 2600. I was the first in our neighborhood to have one. I don't even remember the first games it came with. I only remember later playing Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and one of my all-time favorites Chopper Command. And eventually, I got the Combat cartridge so I could blow the snot out of my brother's 3 sticks with my 3 sticks that were quaintly called tanks.

Over the following years, I have played games on a number of platforms including the Vic-20, the C-64, the original IBM PC's, and a variety of flavors of Apple II. As time progressed and I had kids of my own, and a more powerful PC, I continued playing games and bought games for my kids like Reader Rabbit and Math Rabbit and some just fun stuff for young kids. But still, we all found it kind of boring after a while.

It wasn't until we bought our first Nintendo 64 when my son was old enough that I found a viable console game offering. I never owned an NES or SNES or Sega, or any of the other early consoles between the Atari 2600 days and the Nintendo 64 days. Probably because I did not have kids and I had to try being an adult.

Ah, but with kids of my own I could be a kid again. And so today we have a number of computers in the house with more PC games than I can recall at this time and we have that original N64 my son used and I picked up another one. Add to that three PS2 consoles, 2 GameCubes, and one X-Box and you can say we definitely have a gaming mindset at home.

Why so many? Five kids Count 'em. Five kids. Too much competition over who gets to play what so we just kept buying more hardware.

Yes we would like to have a Wii, PS3, or even a 360 (a pox on Micro$oft). But the prices that these things are going for now are beyond my meager gaming budget. Which is why we have a lot of PC based games. And recently, all but the youngest two in the house are now involved in playing some kind of MMORPG or other online game.

Through this blog I will at times recall back to the days of a classic game or jump into the details of a current game. Or I might go back just a few years ago to games that I still play. Basically there will be no chronological ordering of topics. This is almost a stream-of-consciousness blog, be prepared for the random number generator to have no predictable path throught this maze.

But all this was to point out that it was from those ancient beginnigs of video games that I started my video gaming. And I think I tend to stay fairly current. My teenage son is much more in tune with the gaming community, so I rely on him for insight and information. But the whole family seems to have a video game bug.

Fortunately, the younger 4 kids (all females) have sufficient outside activities that envelope their interests and so they are not quite as addicted to video games as the male child, or possibly the dad child (me), but that is a moot point anyway.