Do you remember the first video game console you played on?
For a lot of people, it was the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Duck Hunt. Mario. You know the one. And if you didn’t have one, you knew someone who did. It was the first in a long line of personal video game systems, and still considered by many to be the console that “started it all.”
But what about those…other gaming consoles? The ones we played on in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that have faded into obscurity, known only by those who were the O.G.’s. The Original Gamers.
I’m not talking about Pinball at Putt-Putt, or Pac-Man at Pizza Hut. Not the arcade games your parents gave you two bucks to play in while they got their shopping done at the mall. I’m talking about Atari. Intellivision. Magnavox. Some might even drop the Commodore in there.
The first at-home video game console I ever played on was the Intellivision. My grandparents had bought it for when I spent weekends with them in grade school, and I dumped hours into Burger Time and D&D on the 9” kitchen television. I even caught my night-owl Grandma playing solitaire a few times, long after I was supposed to be in bed. It had a frustratingly small wired controller with two buttons and a rolling disk instead of a joystick, and I probably screamed in frustration at it more often than I do at my games now.
We never had a system of our own in the house while I was growing up, so I was limited to whichever friends had an NES. Which, admittedly, wasn’t many. My friends judged “wealth” by who had the biggest Barbie house. That stigma of “girls don’t play video games” was 100% real, and 100 times worse 35-40 years ago than it is today. The only friends who had home video game systems had…brothers. And those boys were definitely not interested in sharing game time with their sisters’ friends.
The first home game console that was mine, bought and paid for as a young adult? The Sega Genesis in 1994. Sonic and Shadowrun were my go-to games there, along with others whose names have been lost in the fog of motherhood. I didn’t get my first Nintendo until my firstborn was old enough to play on it in the late 1990’s. And the first computer game I got obsessed over was Warcraft in the early 2000’s. Not “World of…” Just plain old Warcraft, the fantasy world-building strategy game.
Man, I miss that game.
Now, I have three second-generation gamers. We all play a combination of X-Box, Playstation, Nintendo, and PC. Sometimes we have couch co-op game nights, sometimes we play together online. (Cross platform + internet = gamer paradise!) Two of us occasionally stream on Twitch. And just for good measure, we throw in a good, old-fashioned tabletop role-playing game now and then.
But that’s a blog for another day…