The Past Ain’t What It Used to Be
Whilst shopping at a fine boutique last week, I happened across a disc for the Sony Playstation 2 containing several games ported from the original Atari 2600 game system. State of the art in 1984, these games are hardly recognizable as such after these twenty years of non-stop innovation. Nonetheless, these blocky eight-color images blipping and blooping across the screen are part of my childhood. I tend to get really excited about these kinds of things, so I bought it.
In the early days of video games, the technology was pretty primitive. The earliest example of a mass-produced home video game system was Pong - introduced by Atari and distributed almost exclusively by Sears in 1975. For a retail price of US$200-$300, the first units played only one game - a modified ping-pong in black and white. It was a phenomenon. Soon after, in 1977, Atari introduced the VCS, later known as the 2600. If Pong was a phenomenon, the 2600 was nothing less than a cultural sensation. The 2600 was a bit more complex than the clunky Pong units, but not by much. Most 2600 games consisted of vague, blocky shapes chasing, or attempting to escape from other vague, blocky shapes. Dragons were indistinguishable from ducks without the aid of the small manuals that explained everything. The graphics and sound were poor. The bad games looked just like the good ones.
The Activision Anthology package includes more than 45 games - and not a single instruction manual. Some of the games are fun, and some are completely lame. After spending a couple of hours running my square protagonists aimlessly around their little square worlds, I came to wonder if maybe I had been a little too excited about this find. Somehow I remember these games being absolutely fascinating. But after all the years, I’m having trouble seeing these little marvels as I did then. I tried to cut a small slice of my childhood. And it was sweet, but it just didn’t taste the same.
These experiences usually fall shy of my lofty expectations. Much of the magic is gone from those sights and sounds. They say you can never go home again, and from what I’ve seen, I suspect they’re right. Those things and those places aren’t magical anymore, because they’re not mine. They belong to this little freckled kid with a ridiculous cow-lick. He has his pants tucked into his socks, and he’s running around with a broom handle he’s calling a “lightsaber”. He’s the king of his world. He wakes up at dawn and never wants to go to bed. He’s a being of pure energy, and as such, he’s completely ethereal and inscrutable. I can see him only in moments, but can never grasp him. There is magic there, but the magic is in him - not in those things that surround him. The wand is only magic in the hands of the sorceror.
Yet, I continue to haunt those places he used to walk, and I sometimes try to find just a little bit of magic in the things he left behind. Sometimes I get lucky.
Bye for now.
March 30th, 2004 at 7:56 am
The problem with your Atari experience is that you weren’t playing it on an Atari. You didn’t have the frustration of trying to find which joystick worked properly and didn’t screw up your game. You didn’t have the frustration of putting the cartridge in the machine just to get weird colours and feedback on the screen - so much so that you had to take the cartridge out and blow along the business end to get any dust and foreign particulate out from the “microelectronic circuitry”. You didn’t have paddles which were either too sensitive or not sensitive enough.
I have a couple of Ataris and around 50 or so games. I bring it out every so often. Yes it’s not as much fun as it use to be but it does bring back memories. The main one being how I played Laser Attack for almost three hours straight and how a robot could have beat it because every level you did the same thing. Just faster and faster