Video Games

Last month was the thirty-second anniversary of the video game Pac-Man. It got me to reminiscing and thinking about my relationship with video games over the last three decades, especially since my thirtieth wedding anniversary is coming up later this month.

The first video game I ever played was shortly after I graduated from college. I had just finished my first year in my master’s program at UCLA. My roommate and I had gone to a pizza place and discovered a game called Asteroids. We dropped quite a number of quarters on it and made a point to play it any time we went out to pizza after that. It wasn’t long before we found more games, of course. By 1981 I had purchased my first home computer, a precursor to the Commodore 64 called the Commodore VIC-20. It came with a whopping 3 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 8 kilobytes. Pre-loaded with the BASIC programming language I soon learned how to program the machine.

There were but a handful of programs that you could purchase for computers in the early days and most came as cartridges that you plugged into the back of it. Eventually I added a tape drive that used ordinary cassette tapes to save and read programs. It was incredibly slow. dedicated computer monitors were a rarity. To use the computer, I hooked it up to a television turned to channel three.

I soon discovered computer magazines that had programs in them that you could type into the computer. Probably for the first ten years or so, even after I upgraded to a Commodore 64, the bulk of my time on the computer was spent typing in programs from the magazine. It was maddening, since typos were easy to create and you’d spend hours then trying to figure out what you’d done wrong. Until every last letter was typed just right in the program, the program would refuse to run or would run part way through before crashing. The first program I typed in to my VIC-20 was a baseball game. The player was a small glowing ball that blooped slowly around the bases when I got a hit.

Eventually I was able to upgrade to a floppy disk for my Commodore, which made the loading and saving of programs much, much faster and easier than the old tape drive. And by then, premade programs for my computer were becoming much more common.

Meanwhile, of course, I still spent time playing video games in the restaurants we frequented. By late 1981 I was dating the young woman who would become my wife, and many a date was spent playing video games after we had eaten our dinner.

My wife became especially fond of the game Ms. Pac-Man, an unauthorized sequel to the original Pac-Man. The original Pac-Man had been created by Namco, a company in Japan. Ms. Pac-Man was a bootlegged hack originally called Crazy Otto. Created by programmers employed by the General Computer Corporation, they eventually showed it to Midway, the American distributor of the original Pac-Man. So Midway bought the rights to it and the game became a big hit—and Namco became very angry. Eventually, to prevent the inevitable lawsuit that Namco would have brought, the rights to Ms. Pac Man were then turned over to Namco, which made a lot of money from my wife’s quarters.

My wife spent long hours playing Ms. Pac-man. When my wife’s friend Kayleen and her brother Chris were returning to Africa with their missionary parents, they spent an entire evening, well into the wee hours of the morning, playing an entire roll of quarters on Ms. Pac-Man. Given how good my wife and her friends had gotten at the game, it was a wonder they ever came home.

When my wife and I got married, we spent our honeymoon in Lake Tahoe. Unsurprisingly, for the two weeks we were there, we spent several evenings playing video games. The game we particularly enjoyed in Lake Tahoe was called Tempest. Like Ms. Pac-Man, it had been released in 1981.

After I finished my graduate program at UCLA, I got a Commodore 64 to replace my VIC-20. With 64 kilobytes of memory and much better graphics and sound capabilities, it turned out to be a great machine for playing video games. One of our favorites was a side scrolling 3-D game that we had originally played in the arcade: Zaxxon. It had first appeared in 1982 and was then ported to the Commodore in 1985. My wife and I and our friends spent many weekends playing the game. It was one of the few games I ever completely mastered.

Later, as we moved beyond the Commodore 64, we particularly enjoyed the early first-person shooters such as Castle Wofenstein, Doom, and its many sequels and knockoffs. Because of its humor, Duke Nuke’m 3-D became one of our favorites. Later, we became absorbed by Myst and its sequels.

Oddly enough, for the last fifteen years or so–maybe longer–I’ve played hardly any video games at all, while my wife mostly only plays Farmville on Facebook. Where before I had endless hours for video games, for some reason I now barely have time to work and read. I’m not quite sure where all my time has gone or why I seem to have so much less of it now than I did when I was younger. Probably has something to do with my children. Thankfully, if I ever do find my lost time, I’ve got Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest and Duke Nuke’m waiting for me on my X-Box 360–which is set to become obsolete when the new Xbox One comes out at the end of the year. I suppose the old classics will once again be made available for the newest hardware; after all, I can also play them on my iPAD–even Myst and the sequel Riven are on it. Of course, my children think the graphics are lame on all those old games. If I ever played any of them, they’d probably shake their heads laugh at me.