Megavalue 20X4
The first video games I saw for the home were miniature replicas of stand-up arcade games like Pac-man or Donkey Kong or Dig-dug. They stood about 12 inches high and looked just like the arcade version. I was instantly enamored and while others in the third grade were fortunate enough to have these precious items, I did not. My friends even had Ataris and Intellivisions and Colecovisions at home. I had the Pac-man board game.
My cousin, about a decade or so older than myself, had an Intellivision. I looked forward to going to my Aunt and Uncle's on holidays, just so I could watch him and his friends box or ski or play cards in bad pixelly goodness. I wanted one, but the system was expensive, and the games moreso. One Summer, my mom offered me an interesting proposition. She would pot plants from her garden, load up my little red wagon, and send me to sit along the main road at the end of our block next to a cardboard "Plant Sale" sign. Yeah. It's a mystery to me why kids beat me up too. Anyway, whatever I sold, half the profits were mine, and I could save up for my own system.
By this time a local store called Odd Lot was selling Intellivision consoles for $50, quite the bargain. And my mom was willing to let me hook it up to our spare TV, a modest 13" black and white set. Odd Lot sold games 2 for a dollar by this point, so my collection grew to be quite impressive. Snafu, Astrosmash, Demon Attack, He-man and the Masters of the Universe, Lock 'n Chase, Vectron, Frogger and yes even Donkey Kong were among my collection of over 30 games. I even got the Intellivision "computer", a keyboard with Duplo-sized keys that allowed me to do basic programming such as an ASCII man doing jumping jacks, or other "state-of-the-art" graphics. If anyone else out there finds meaning in the phrase, "Twenty Goto Ten", drinks are on me.
In Middle School I was enjoying computer labs more sophisticated than the ones I had in elementary school. In the 5th grade, data was actually stored on the same kind of cassette tapes audio was recorded on. If you wanted to know what nails on a chalkboard would sound like in HELL, all you had to do was pop one of those things into a cassette player and hit "play". By 7th grade I was learning a text-based drawing program called LOGO in which you would type something like "CircleR red" and it would draw a red counterclockwise circle. I'm pretty sure this predated the mouse, and that somewhere in this replica of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark that I call a room, I still have a giant useless floppy disk containing my animation of a technicolor "Death Star" being hit with a laser and exploding.
Games and computers were growing more and more sophisticated and the hero of Donkey Kong had spun off into his own games. As much as I enjoyed Super Mario Brothers in the arcade-like lobby of a Modell's department store(in the days when they were more than just sporting goods), I was awestruck at the notion that I could play it at home. I wanted a Nintendo. My parents wanted me to go to a strict all-boys Catholic high school and not the drug-rich violent basis for Boston Public that our local public school was. Once more a deal was struck. Once more, a game system was mine.
I got my Intellivision years after it was popular, but the Nintendo wasn't that old so most of the games were full price, ranging from $20-$40 as I recall. Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt came with the system, but the rest of my collection had to be built. It took longer to grow than my Intellivision collection, and I never had more than 7 or 8 games, but by then games were a greater investment of time. Super Mario Brothers 1-3 could take anywhere from an hour to three hours to beat, depending on whether or not you used warp zones. Megaman, Batman, and Bionic Commando all took about an hour. Kung Fu I could get through pretty quickly but since it was infinite, I never truly felt like I beat that game no matter how many hearts surrounded our couple. Why, Thomas? Why couldn't you keep Sylvia from being kidnapped over and over and taken to the same five floor dojo? You think Kwai Chang Caine would stand for that sort of thing?
These days I enjoy my PS2 on a 27" Sharp flatscreen television. Games like Final Fantasy can take as much as 40 to 60 hours to play, so it's a good thing memory cards store progress so I don't have to do it in one sitting. I picked up Capcom's Megaman Anniversary collection for $30. That's eight classic games plus two unreleased unlockable games, all for about the same price Megaman alone cost me on my NES. I've been playing the saga in order this week, and enjoying it immensely. I also recently purchased the Street Fighter collection, which has a hybrid of every variation of SF II games as well as SF III, and the Street Fighter II feature-length anime that I hadn't seen since college. Also in my collection is Intellivision Lives, which doesn't contain all the games in my collection but most of them, as well as quite a few I never had. And THAT one was only $20.
These collections are quite a megavalue given what I once paid for the originals. I suppose years from now when I have kids of my own, I may pick up a "retro" game for whatever console their generation is playing, and find all the games in my PS2 collection on one biopod. But for now, I'll gladly go to Best Buy at lunch with my co-workers.
My cousin, about a decade or so older than myself, had an Intellivision. I looked forward to going to my Aunt and Uncle's on holidays, just so I could watch him and his friends box or ski or play cards in bad pixelly goodness. I wanted one, but the system was expensive, and the games moreso. One Summer, my mom offered me an interesting proposition. She would pot plants from her garden, load up my little red wagon, and send me to sit along the main road at the end of our block next to a cardboard "Plant Sale" sign. Yeah. It's a mystery to me why kids beat me up too. Anyway, whatever I sold, half the profits were mine, and I could save up for my own system.
By this time a local store called Odd Lot was selling Intellivision consoles for $50, quite the bargain. And my mom was willing to let me hook it up to our spare TV, a modest 13" black and white set. Odd Lot sold games 2 for a dollar by this point, so my collection grew to be quite impressive. Snafu, Astrosmash, Demon Attack, He-man and the Masters of the Universe, Lock 'n Chase, Vectron, Frogger and yes even Donkey Kong were among my collection of over 30 games. I even got the Intellivision "computer", a keyboard with Duplo-sized keys that allowed me to do basic programming such as an ASCII man doing jumping jacks, or other "state-of-the-art" graphics. If anyone else out there finds meaning in the phrase, "Twenty Goto Ten", drinks are on me.
In Middle School I was enjoying computer labs more sophisticated than the ones I had in elementary school. In the 5th grade, data was actually stored on the same kind of cassette tapes audio was recorded on. If you wanted to know what nails on a chalkboard would sound like in HELL, all you had to do was pop one of those things into a cassette player and hit "play". By 7th grade I was learning a text-based drawing program called LOGO in which you would type something like "CircleR red" and it would draw a red counterclockwise circle. I'm pretty sure this predated the mouse, and that somewhere in this replica of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark that I call a room, I still have a giant useless floppy disk containing my animation of a technicolor "Death Star" being hit with a laser and exploding.
Games and computers were growing more and more sophisticated and the hero of Donkey Kong had spun off into his own games. As much as I enjoyed Super Mario Brothers in the arcade-like lobby of a Modell's department store(in the days when they were more than just sporting goods), I was awestruck at the notion that I could play it at home. I wanted a Nintendo. My parents wanted me to go to a strict all-boys Catholic high school and not the drug-rich violent basis for Boston Public that our local public school was. Once more a deal was struck. Once more, a game system was mine.
I got my Intellivision years after it was popular, but the Nintendo wasn't that old so most of the games were full price, ranging from $20-$40 as I recall. Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt came with the system, but the rest of my collection had to be built. It took longer to grow than my Intellivision collection, and I never had more than 7 or 8 games, but by then games were a greater investment of time. Super Mario Brothers 1-3 could take anywhere from an hour to three hours to beat, depending on whether or not you used warp zones. Megaman, Batman, and Bionic Commando all took about an hour. Kung Fu I could get through pretty quickly but since it was infinite, I never truly felt like I beat that game no matter how many hearts surrounded our couple. Why, Thomas? Why couldn't you keep Sylvia from being kidnapped over and over and taken to the same five floor dojo? You think Kwai Chang Caine would stand for that sort of thing?
These days I enjoy my PS2 on a 27" Sharp flatscreen television. Games like Final Fantasy can take as much as 40 to 60 hours to play, so it's a good thing memory cards store progress so I don't have to do it in one sitting. I picked up Capcom's Megaman Anniversary collection for $30. That's eight classic games plus two unreleased unlockable games, all for about the same price Megaman alone cost me on my NES. I've been playing the saga in order this week, and enjoying it immensely. I also recently purchased the Street Fighter collection, which has a hybrid of every variation of SF II games as well as SF III, and the Street Fighter II feature-length anime that I hadn't seen since college. Also in my collection is Intellivision Lives, which doesn't contain all the games in my collection but most of them, as well as quite a few I never had. And THAT one was only $20.
These collections are quite a megavalue given what I once paid for the originals. I suppose years from now when I have kids of my own, I may pick up a "retro" game for whatever console their generation is playing, and find all the games in my PS2 collection on one biopod. But for now, I'll gladly go to Best Buy at lunch with my co-workers.
posted by MCF at 11:32 PM
1 Comments:
Boy, does that bring back memories! Like you, I was always behind the game-console curve growing up. My first system was an Atari2600 and that came into my possession well after everyone else had moved on to Intellivision and Colecovision.
I have some great memories of getting around the console at my house or at friends and spending hours and hours playing. There was boxing and football on Billy's Intellivision, Missle Command on Alan's Atari2600, and endless time spent playing Asteroids at my house.
Oddly enough, now that I think about it, my son is always a bit behind the game-console curve. I got him his GBA a year after it came out, and his SP a year after it hit the market. And he has a Gamecube while most of his friends have that and either a PS2 and/or X-Box as well.
Could there be some sort of "behind the game-console curve curse"?
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