Friday · October 17 2003
Nine kids aged 10-13 sat down with Electronic Gaming Monthly to play and review several classic video game titles: Pong, Donkey Kong, E.T. (notoriously awful game for the Atari 2600), Super Mario Bros., Space Invaders, Tetris, and Mattel's handheld Electronic Football. I have played and been mesmerized by each of those games in their era. Except the E.T. game for Atari. I had the same reaction these kids did even then: Wow is this a bad game.
Space InvadersMy kids will probably find my Xbox one day and laugh at Halo and Madden Football. They'll wonder how I could ever play a massively multiplayer game where you had to actually type to communicate with the other players. "Dad, I can't believe you had fun without a full virtual reality helmet with full surround headphones." Or something like that.
Kirk: I'm sure everyone who made this game is dead by now.
EGM: Would you rather play this or play outside?
Andrew: Outside.
E.T.
Becky: Maybe another movie company that didn't want you to like E.T. made this game.
Andrew: Yeah, it was some sort of corporate sabotage.
Pong
Niko: Hey—Pong. My parents played this game.
Brian: It takes this whole console just to do Pong?
Kirk: What is this? [Picks up and twists the paddle controller] Am I controlling the volume?
I have an Atari 2600 and I'm 31 years old. I bought it and some games for about $30 in a fit of nostalgia/ebay discovery a couple of years ago. I haven't played it in about a year because, even for me, it is now boring. Pitfall was the coolest game ever back then ... now it's the same damn thing over and over! I couldn't wait to see the reactions of my 6 and 12-year-old cousins when I told them about it. But, alas, I was disappointed when I learned they'd already played lots of 2600 games on a playstation game that you can get for $5. "Yeah, they're kinda funny," my cousin Eddie said.