This was brought to my attention by someone who remembers the old Nintendo from his childhood. I remember it from my children’s childhood, but my recollection is no less fond for that.
I, too, spent many an hour with Super Mario and Duck Hunt. I couldn’t let the kids leave me behind, could I?
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We had the Sears-Roebuck version of the Atari 2600. I was king of Breakout. My kids had some system at their grandparents house–post-NES, I think. Every time I played my car ran into walls and stuff. There were too many buttons on the controller for me to keep straight.
I like mechanical pinball machines. Russell House, circa 1978.
Back when you could drink beer on campus.
Love pinball. Eight Ball was one of my favorite–just the right number of bouncers and lights. And I remember one that had a playing-card motif and one with a cowgirl on it. I had good reflexes, but I was terrible at aiming and nudging.
Always gets the replay, I’ve never seen him fall…
like
there was a really old one that was only a dime to play, rather than a quarter
I preferred the pinball machine in the coin laundry on the corner of Blossom and Main Streets across from Snowden dorm. You could play that sucker for an hour with one quarter back in ’73 while you did laundry! The two finishing nails on the right side nstead of a bumper helped…
There’s a small store on North Main St. just south of the CSX railroad trestle and Earlewood Park that fixes and maybe sells coin-op video games and pinball machines. I have been meaning to go in and check it out. I think there’s also a company up in Fort Mill that restores and sells pinball machines. I’d like one, not sure which one, though.
A friend of mine in Wichita back in the 80s was big on brewing beer at home. He got excited once because a local business was selling arcade games, and he thought he might get a Star Wars game (the kind you sat in, and piloted your fighter into position to destroy the Death Star) and install it in his beer-making room.
Then, life would be perfect if only he could reprogram Obi-Wan’s voice to say, at the critical moment, “Have another beer, Luke!”
We had simple pleasures in those days…
I bought a 1973 refurbished Gottlieb Big Brave pinball machine from a place in Philadelphia. It sits in my den and is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. An endless source of amusement for the whole family and the delight of visitors.
I’ve got the matching Big Indian pinball machine that’s been refurished… I think the only difference is 2-player vs 4-player.
Kathryn,
I agree! Pinball is great! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFrDpx7zLtA
However, I stuffed many quarters into a game called “Pong” where Hunter-Gather now sits; I think it was called “Campus Club South”. Putting the “spin” on the ball was great. The Russell House put in some video games and my favorite was “Gunslinger” where I would take out my opponent with a ricochet shot.
This was entertainment for college kids in the 70’s. There’ no way in hell that this behavior could be used as a defense in the shooting of Martha Childress.
If anything, video games today are more violent than 20-30 years ago. A friend and former coworker has said “There is no reset in life.”
I had an original Nintendo as a child.
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, Duck Hunt, and Super Mario 3 are the games that I would take with me if I was stranded on a desert island with an original Nintendo and a power source.
I had an original NES too. I was good at Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, and learned to become the champ. I didn’t care for Duck Hunt, but I spent hours on The Legend of Zelda. I’d like to play those games again.
Of course prior to that, I had an IBM PC jr. I played hours of Zork & Adventure, two of the earliest and best text-based adventure games. Later on I got King’s Quest, another classic adventure game, but graphic. Hours and hours of fun.
Later on I got a modem and discovered BBS’s, hacking and phone phreaking.
Zelda was grat. I never had that, but a friend of mine had the one with the golden-looking cartridge. I spent a lot of time over at his house. Not sure, but I only ever remember that Zelda cartridge being anything other than the standard gray plastic.
We had a TI994a back in the 80s, which played some games. There was a version of pole position, and something just like Space Invaders. I also learned to write some extremely simple code on it, in BASIC. Of course, if you wanted to save anything, you had to do it on a tape deck.
But the first video game I recall was a Pong game my brother had in about 1975…
I had a TI994a 🙂 I was in middle school. I played a lot of Munch Man and Hunt the Wampus. I learned how to write corny programs that played songs and drew pictures at the same time. I saved them on a cassette deck too. At some point we got a voice synthesizer cartridge for it. I remember my brother and I thought it was hysterical to make it pronounce the alphabet. I think we were easily amused.
In the student lounge at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore in the late 70s, early 80s, there was an Asteroids game. When we should have been practicing piano, several of us spent a lot of money on it, but eventually learned that if you left one little rock and did NOT clear the field, you could just cruise across the screen or lurk around and wait for the little flying saucer and rack up points, earning a new “life” every 10,000 points without limit, so you could rack up tons of your own ships. Moreover, we pianists had an advantage because we practiced “repeated-note” technique, using a multiple-finger tremulo kind of effect on the fire button, which made our fusillade of bullets much tighter together than those who just pushed the button with the same finger repeatedly as the average player would.
I remember a pianist friend thus playing a single Asteroids game for well over 8 hours on one quarter. He amassed so many ships/lives that he was able to take bathroom breaks and let himself get blown up a bunch of times and come back (the game was guarded by friends) with no danger of “game over.” Peabody grads still talk about that day. If we’d practiced piano as much as Asteroids, maybe we would have been superstars by now. Oh well. At least our repeated notes were really good. Every time I play Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso there’s a section where I think I’m back strafing alien spaceships.
No doubt this aided your new music endeavors….
My 7yo son has a hard time believing that his dad and I actually played Mario long before he was born.
I guess what’s more amazing is that there’s a second generation of kids (maybe even a 3rd by now) who are playing Mario.