You kids don’t know who good you have it these days. Take a look at this 1983 Sears circular showcasing only the newest, hottest video games.
So while you’re tooling around Albion in Fable II or dying over and over again in LittleBigPlanet, think of those poor souls in 1983. All they had to look forward to was Missle Command and Defender.
But for you cubicle dwellers, this should take you back to a happier time, when the only boss you had to worry about was the one at the end of the game, not the one demanding mid-week progress reports.
via Evil Avatar
I loved Missle Command. It’s one of my all time favorites. I played it on my Atari 400 every damn day.
…mid-week progress reports…
Just so you know, they’re called “TPS” reports and Arcade Pinball is still awesome!
Hey, I remember those ads and those games. Great classics, but sort of pale today. *sigh* I feel old.
I got one of those storage units still full of Atari games. Those games cost a lot less than today. Kmart used to sell $5 games that I picked up back in the day.
These times were far more exciting than 2008. Please do not feel pity. Video gaming (called TV Games, largely unknown to many people back then) just entered a new era after the Pong age. The home computer was advancing everywhere. There were quite some game consoles and completely new games were introduced over and over. This was stunning because you didn’t know what you were going to see next. You only knew you were going to see new, unimaginable things. Especially concepts. Abstract interactive art with an addictive touch of reality. In the late 80’s this pure magic slowly faded away since by then anything was possible/imaginable (graphics) and there were no real new concepts. F/A-18 Interceptor was the last game I recall being something completely new. And Sim City of course. GTA-III revived that magic again, years later. And last year Orbiter, since it is a rather scientific simulation which begs for more.
Video games in the 1983’s required some imagination, I agree, but that made it super exciting. Flying a plane in pseudo 3D for the first time in your life, walking around in a virtual village for the first time in your life, tank combats requiring stratgey, submarines, UFO’s over the White House, monsters, mazes, 3D racetracks, flight simulators for delivering mail, etcetera. Those games were impossible to imagine just some years before. It was so new that grandparents worried that broadcast companies would file bills.
I remember ads like this very well. You could dream them, watching them over and over, trying to imagine what it would be like playing these games. For months.
2008 offers much more, yes. And no. New games aren’t new at all. It’s the same old car, same old soldier, same old tennis player, same old whatever. Introduced in these early ‘boring’ eighties with abstract -but sometimes marvelous- graphics and effects. A lot of brilliant concepts were lost, or are still played today, like Pac Man and other Arcade games.
Try Mame32 (arcade game emulator) and WinVICE (commodore emulator). Keep an eye on 80s guru Jeff Minter (Abductor, Gridrunner, Mutant Camels) who is working on new gaming concepts.
These were the good old days. Oh yeah, time passes by too quickly.