When I was in Kindergarten, living in Cleveland, I remember a yellow game console that sat in our living room and got plugged in on special occasions. It played Pong, but my folks referred to it as Hockey, so maybe that's what the clone was actually called. Anyway, I thought it was really cool that you could control something on TV, let alone play a game against someone. It was an EVENT when it got hooked up to our television set, because it was way neater than any of the toys I had. It was definitely more interesting than a Pinball machine. We kept the unit when we moved to Milwaukee, but I don't remember seeing it after that.
In 1980, when I was 9 and we'd recently moved to Albuquerque, my dad dragged my brother and I along to his gym to wait in the lobby while he worked out. Looking forward to a boring afternoon with nothing to do, Mike and I brought along a matchbox car and a book (respectively). Arriving, we saw a strange coffee table between the reception couches, and ambled over to investigate as dad went off to torture himself by deliberately lifting heavy things over and over.
It was a table-top model of the Asteroids Deluxe coin-op -- my first encounter with a non-Pong video game. The lines and square ball had evolved into the shapes of boulders and an actual spaceship, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. You could shoot at stuff, and you had three chances to keep from being smashed or shot. It was a scenario, not an ultra-simple tennis court affair. I remember how it became a whole new game once I discovered the "thrust" button. New elements like that never arose in Pong. A further step beyond the role-playing sophistication of Asteroids Deluxe didn't occur to me, because I had nothing to compare it to except Pong. It was the height of consumer-ready technology.
I ran after dad and asked him for some quarters. He gave me the ones he had, but my brother and I quickly used them up. We could then only look at the game's teaser mode. I became so desperate to be in the little spaceship again that I worked up the nerve to approach one of the gym's members, a complete stranger who was standing in the lobby, and ask him if I could borrow a quarter. It was crucial that I further challenge this cool new machine. The prospect of leaving the gym without playing any more was tantamount to the end of the world. The stranger came over following my solicitation and looked at the game.
"Yeah, you better show me how to play," he said, and got us a couple dollars' worth of quarters. (Remember when strangers did cool things like that sometimes?) My dad came out to check on us and saw us still playing the game. The stranger told him, "They're showing me how to play." My dad thanked the guy, a little embarrassed, and returned to his workout.
One night later in the year, he had an argument with my mom and decided to bring me to the bar with him. He seldom drank, but when we got there I beheld the actual object of his patronage: Pac-Man. He showed me how to play and I was fascinated. This was surely the most incredible progression from the single-color Asteroids screen that was possible. I didn't even know that these things were called "video games"; there were just Asteroids machines, and now, Pac-Man machines. I played a couple of games, and the wild colors and multi-character action -- something that wasn't taken for granted yet -- blew my mind so thoroughly that I could clear little more than one corridor's worth of dots. "It takes practice," my dad said in that typical state-the-obvious mode of fathering.
Our first VCS was brought home in 1981, along with Space Invaders and (of course) Combat. I couldn't play the thing enough. That's all I did; all I thought about was getting more games. I invented new ones that I fantasized about programming someday. I envied people who had games that I didn't. They were all exciting to me. What an improvement on the so-called Hockey machine we'd once had!
I first saw a Defender stand-up in a gas station. I didn't play it, because whatever grownup was driving didn't have time to wait around, but I thought it was neat how the game's characters were introduced Pac-Man-style during the teaser mode despite being aliens and spaceships instead of cutesy ghosts. I first played it in a Safeway grocery store; I dropped in the lone quarter my mom gave me, blew away a few enemies, and got the dreaded GAME OVER message the second I finally figured out the controls. This was a new peak of involvement.
Left without anything else to do, I watched the demo until I finally realized that you were supposed to shoot Landers and rescue the Humanoids that they kidnapped, returning them safely to the ground. What a cool idea! Manic to play the game now that I knew what was going on, I begged my mother for another quarter, but she didn't have any more and didn't feel like getting change.
My first Tempest was at the local Husky truck stop/diner. Donkey Kong and Centipede were both first spotted at a local Smith's grocery store, and I finally played the former at a Howard Johnson's restaurant. Red Baron and Missile Command were first indulged-in during a fourth-grade field trip to Chuck E. Cheese. Technology had been maximized; these detailed, often wonderfully frightening but usually cartoony games with their demanding quests or goals, fantastic graphics and sounds and eventually-absorbed control methods were the height of entertainment, as far as I was concerned, and I didn't see them topped for a couple years.
But then the Star Wars coin-op came out, and then shortly after that, realistic flight simulators took over 8-bit software sales. Surely a new height. I played games on my Commodore 64 that blew away everything that had previously been seen on the little TV in my room. Later, the Amiga version of Firebird's Elite was the most exciting first-person plateau I could conceive of. Throughout, people in the industry made accurate predictions about the future of gaming: Games would be so realistic that they would be like interactive movies, and scenarios would get more complex, the player's involvement more all-encompassing. Since that had already happened a few times, as I've just reminisced, this wasn't difficult to forecast.
But what predictions do we hear today? I mean, skip ahead to nowadays, with vast and super-involving role-playing games on PCs, first-person exploration epics (Doom) and the "sort-of first-person" action games on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 (Tomb Raider, Zelda 64). These are basically the heights of technological entertainment that one can buy in a department store, and they're also the main game forms the industry's settled on. But think about it: What's beyond that?
Sure, graphics will get a lot better, with digitized real images becoming more prominent until, I imagine, that's all we'll see. Microprocessors will get faster until speed isn't an issue. But what about the actual complexity and player involvement of the games? The graphic capabilities and chip speeds that designers now have at their disposal have finally allowed them to realize the most extreme game ideas. Plot concepts, the player's ability to revolve an imaginary world around him and the rules themselves have reached what is possibly the highest height in gaming innovation. Because, while future games will be more technically superior, how can the actual storylines, game-play methods and player involvement that we're now seeing be surpassed?
Good as Pac-Man and Star Wars were at the time, it was easy to think about what could be added to make them more realistic or require the player to do more things and feel more engaged by the landscapes and characters. But try to think beyond the playing scheme of Mario 64. I mean, what do you have beyond that? The scenario, even solely on its level of action, could hardly be widened.
Of course, this doesn't bother those of us who have at least as much fun going a few rounds with our ColecoVisions as playing any new game. But it's something to think about -- because a new type of video game would be very impressive back in the '80s and early '90s, simply because, like me with that first Asteroids coin-op, there was no precedent against which to measure it. But what new types of games do we have left?
Invent the video game of the future. If you feel like writing about it, send it along, because I'd be extremely interested in seeing what vistas the industry has left to explore, if any. -- CF
Sure, if you read our articles, you know that we try to take a serious, intelligent approach to video games and even try to articulate our love for the hobby and where it comes from. But we also like incorporating a sense of humor -- do our readers?
We think so! But last issue, we posted a blurb about a new contest we were having, spawned by a reader letter mentioning the fart-like sound of a strike in the Fairchild Bowling game. We asked that readers send in any farting moments they could remember in the extensive library of classic video or computer games. You know how many responses we've gotten so far? One!
Come on, professional gaming cohorts! E-mail or send us brief descriptions of any farting sounds you'd like to enlighten us on. We're hoping to include a whole article based on them in issue #8. Help us celebrate the first-year anniversary of Adam & I publishing this newsletter together by enjoying the humorous potential inherent in our hobby! Thanks! -- CF