Pong in our future?

Pretty soon we will all be sitting around the flat screen tv playing pong since that was such a cool game when we were growing up!

Last update: July 26, 2004 at 3:50 PM
Backfence: Are you game?
James Lileks,  Star Tribune 


I asked for your early beloved video-game memories; your responses brought a tear to my eye. Really. Ah, the nostalgia. Ah, the times we had. Ah, the hours wasted in pointless pixel chases -- hours we'll be silently lamenting as we're old men in nursing homes, our gaming hands curled into useless hooks.
Hey, that would make a great game: Escape From Oaken Hills Managed Care.
Really. You have to find your way out of the place and get back your power of attorney, armed only with a bedpan. In 25 years, after all, there will be great demand from the geezer demographic for games that reflect their lives, and while some 80-year-olds may feel a deep kinship with Xtreme Beach Volleyball, most will want something more grown-up. Like shooting Nazi-Zombies from Venus who want to drag you back to the nursing home.
Today's tales are all about 'Roid Rage. Asteroids, to be specific. From Pastor Scott:
My favorite memory has to be the first time my cousin Mark flipped the score on Asteroids. Seems that the program would only register score to a certain decimal point; either 100,000 or 1 million, I can't remember which. At any rate, one day Mark hit a hot streak, and after about 45 minutes of play or so, we saw the score inching into uncharted territory. In breathless anticipation, we watched as the score passed the magic number and reverted to 0 before climbing up again.
I got the same thrill when I flipped the odometer on my '82 Monte Carlo during college, but that's another story. ...
I flipped the odometer in college, too. By which I mean I put the car in the ditch upside down. Now, from Bob:
Probably my next favorite game was Red Baron, another vector-based flight sim, kinda like Battlezone. You were flying in WWI. That was sweet! I had the high score in Mankato for months. I think they eventually removed the machine with my high score.
The high score. Every man needs to have a high score at some point in his life, and I'm not talking something lame like a "personal best," but a HIGH FREAKIN' SCORE that makes other men whimper and slink away. The saddest kind of high score is the type you get in an airport arcade, or some such place you'll never visit again. There's no one to share your glory. You walk away from the machine with deep sadness, having shared a special moment few will ever know about. Farewell, mon amour. Don't cry. We'll always have the arcade in Terminal C at Cleveland International Airport. No, the only high scores that really matter are the ones you get in your regular haunt. Your local. Your joint. And my joint was the storied Valli in Dinkytown USA.
Back at the Valli there were two kinds of high scores: pinball and video games. When you got high score on a pinball game it gave three short knocks, one for each free game. The sound made men look up from their beers, or down at their hands. The king is dead. Long live the king. There was no such auditory reward for a video-game high score, just peer approval. You entered your initials, or your three-letter nom de guerre. For most of 1981, the Asteroids machine's high scores belonged to me -- JRL -- or RIC or JET or MAY. Then one day I popped down after class to spend a half-hour of wrist-wrecking button mashing, and what I saw chilled my blood:
WAG
The next four high games: WAG. WAG. WAG. WAG. and his lowest best-score was better than ours by thousands of points.
WAG. The name was whispered, cursed, mocked. WAG? Heh. Let him show up here again! And of course he did, the very next day. He was not a regular, or at least he didn't socialize with the people who spent most of their time in the Valli's snug beery cavern. He didn't say much; he just went to work, and we saw at once how he got the high scores. Instead of tapping the fire button, he used his first and index fingers to double his fire rate. We'd never seen an innovation like this before. It felt like cheating, somehow. (Jet Varhar was particularly scornful of anyone who used "Wag bullets," as he called them.) WAG soon moved on to Centipede, and rolled the score over a few times before he disappeared completely. I think he stopped at the door and said "And now I am off to marry a supermodel." He was the best we'd seen. That, ladies and gentleman, was a gamer.
How we hated him.