I might be a bit older than a lot of the people that talk about this sort of stuff but one of the things that I appreciate about my personal gaming history is that I was there when it all began. I was there when we had a handheld game that only had a few blinking lights on it that were solely red and you had to maneuver down the "field" score a touchdown.
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You never played defense, you just ran up the score as much as you could. It would only beep in one sound that I recall, and there would be a longer beep if you got tackled. Mostly you would just lure the defense up to the top of the screen and then run to the other side and go all the way to the end. Then you would re-appear on the other side of the screen and do it over and over again.
Does that sound boring? Well it certainly would be by today's standards but we didn't have anything else to compare it to and these things were all over the place. You can buy them today but if you want an original one in the packaging be prepared to throw around hundreds of dollars.
Then we had another kind of handheld game that had no electronics in it at all! Perhaps you have seen these at some point in your life
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That single button was actually a small air pump that would push the plastic rings to fly through the water and perhaps land on the pegs to catch them. It was a true exercise in frustration. These things were basically indestructible plastic gizmos and the only way you could really destroy them was to fill them up with something other than distilled water, which of course everyone did at some point or another. It might seem like a good idea to fill it up with Sprite to add another element of fun to the game, but it isn't a good idea and you can only do that once because afterwards all the rings will be permanently stuck to one another.
Another bad idea is to pour a packet of those little dehydrated shrimps called "Sea Monkeys" into the tank. Not only is the game not going to work anymore but you are also going to be committing mass genocide of all the dehydrated shrimps. It was entertaining once, then it was just kind of sad.
Then there was the best one of them all.
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It was called "Labyrinth" by brand name but a lot of generic versions of it called something like "wooden maze game" were introduced to the market as well and I have no idea how they avoided lawsuits since it was exactly the same thing.
You controlled the platform with two knobs on the sides which would tilt the board in a certain direction so that you could attempt to guide a marble all the way to the end. It was a lot more difficult than it looks because towards the end there weren't many safe corners to rush the ball too. I played this game so much that I actually figured out shortcuts to jump walls to skip 3/4 of the board. Rough-housing the cheap wooden box like this resulted in stretching out the mechanism inside the box and rendering it unplayable... but it was fun while it lasted.
This was all before video games took over the world and I recall how interesting it was to travel to the toy store and see an entire aisle dedicated to table-top or board games. I wonder if this is even a thing anymore outside of collectors. I don't think that kids really play board games anymore but what do I know, I haven't been a kid for many many years.
Did you have any basic games that you played before we all got our hands on controllers and increasingly powerful video game consoles? When I think back to how basic our entertainment was back in those days I believe it would have absolutely blown our minds if we had just a peek at what entertainment was going to be like 30 years later.
Wow, these bring back memories!
Well I can say this wasn't my generation at all. It's crazy to see how far we've come when it comes to games to video games.
Didn't expect you to be that old :P I always thought you were younger
nah, i'm not. But I'm quite happy to be the age that I am. I got to see the real life changes of gaming as it was happening. Plus, we can't change our age just our mindset!
oooo this is a great mindset to have. That's why it's crazy and impressive when you see those that are older and still seem young. Like I saw a 80+ year old granny doing dancing on americas got talent and what not etc and this dancing was not slow. Well for me I'm not too excited to age. I still want to enjoy and work towards accomplishing some life goals and feel like I lived a productive meaningful and impactful life wooo
I saw a blurb the other day about how one of the most popular gaming channels is the 80 year old woman who plays Elder Scrolls and is actually pretty good at it. I've not watched any of them but I can see how people would find that endearing.
Yes I know about that lady! That's what is amazing you can be old and still play video games :D. Or even old games are still running like tetris and the way they play is always cool to watch how a simple game has all these tactics and skills lol
I like old games sometimes but for the most part I think if you have a good memory of an old game it might be best to leave it in your memories and not go back and play it. For example, I really loved Phatasy Star 2 and 3 so I went back to revisit them with a Genesis emulator. I could only stand it for about an hour before I was questioning why it is that I ever liked those games to begin with. A lot changes in 30 years!
lol that's how I feel when i play league of legends. I play it then I wonder why I Play it because it's just toxic :D but then i keep going back. but what about games like pokemon? I don't think I would ever feel that way towards pokemon cause it was super fun then and I still think it's fun now. Even super smash, I'd still play it on gamecube if I owned one still and I think many still play it. Even classic tetris has a lot of newer generation people playing it despite being so old . I think it really depends on the game?
Some good oldies here. That labyrinth game was the bane of my existence. I probably put 30 hours into that thing.
Yeah, I was rage quitting with a tabletop game before we had controllers to throw at the television. I think I probably made it through the entire labyrinth just a couple times without cheating. There were a couple of walls you could jump if you were trying to speedrun. Seriously, i had a ton of patience back in the 80's.
The things I played with during long stays at relatives houses were the ball in a cup toy and a paddle ball toy along with a set of chess boards. I could never get the ball back in the cup but I could paddle a ball for awhile before the elastic got too stretched out and brittle. It was fun at the time and during slow times any source of entertainment is appreciated. Thanks for your post! It was a good trip down memory lane.
Was the paddle-ball toy like a ping-pong paddle that had a rubber ball attached to it by a long rubber-band?
Yep! We would often get those for birthdays or Christmas so there would always be something to do.
We had one of those and something else called "clackers" in the 80's
Obviously after playing with it as intended for a little while it immediately became a deadly weapon. How did we survive the 80's again?
My mind had a huge flashback when I saw the Water Ring Toss (I remember never being able to get them do something cool other than just pushing the button and having the rings that missed the target just jump around) and the Labyrinth pictures. I cannot actually remember when, how and if I actually got my hands at least once at the Labyrinth/wooden maze, but for some reason I feel like I can vaguely remember playing with something like that quite a bit when I did.
I hadn't ever seen the first one but it reminded me of those little battery-powered "Block Game" things that were primitive Tetris for your pocket that I had seen at least 3 times in my life. I'd also call the Polystation, as much as it was simply a bootleg NES, one of these for me considering how so many people I had met as a kid had one but your choice was whatever their cartridges could offer and nothing else lol
Really cool topic right here, thanks for your post :)
The ring toss games would be semi-functional even when they were brand new. Then, if left in a humid environment they would start to mold, the little air pump would break or get clogged, and then we would just try to come up with innovative ways to destroy them. I preferred firecrackers myself.
I remember some of these and how the world has changed. Watched the movie Tetris the other day and is worth watching as it takes you back to the beginning of when things changed.
I recently watched that as well and though it was a pretty fantastic film.
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