Friday, October 17, 2003

Child's play

Electronic Gaming Monthly has a great article up where they show kids some of the early video games from the 70s and 80s and record their responses. It is understandable that kids raised on NES and Playstation and Xbox would be incredulous when shown Pong... it's almost like listening to anthropologists trying to determine the usefulness of some ancient artifact.

It's hard to believe the extent to which those primitive games captured our attention back then. But hell, anything to take our minds off of disco.

From the article:

Brian: What's this supposed to be?
EGM: Football. It's one of the first great portable games.
Brian: I thought it was Run Away From the Dots.
John: I don't see how this has anything remotely to do with football.
EGM: Which team are you playing?
Kirk: The red lines.
Tim: They could've just as easily called this game anything - Baseball, Bowling, Escape From the Monsters.
EGM: Did you score?
Kirk: I bumped into a dot.

Fascinating.

Sad disclosure: when I first met Anne-Marie, I was addicted to Super Mario Brothers. I could play the whole game through to the end on one quarter, and when Anne-Marie wanted to find me she knew I would usually be glued to the game. She must have spent a hundred hours watching me play that damned game. It's amazing she stuck with me at all.