When I was a kid, we played ...
Every generation of adults seems doomed to think that their kids have been born
into a poorer culture (when it comes to music, of course, in my case that's undoubtedly true, but that's a different story). I'm old enough to be able to tell my kids
that we really played outside (or read books) rather than devoted most of our
time to computer games. But the day doesn't seem particularly far off when even
the oldest people around will have to shake their heads in dismay and exclaim
- in my day we played Break-Out and Tetris, not these second rate computer games
that kids play today. And in honor of that inevitable feeling that today's youth
live in culturally deprived times, this month's date tie-ie is devoted to the
release of the first commercially successful video game - Pong.
It was on this day, in 1972, that one of the
founders of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, placed the first Pong console inside a Sunnyvale,
California bar named Andy Capp's Tavern. Was Pong really as addictive as stories
tell us? I'm a bit too old to know, though I admit that I remember devoting considerably
more time that I had available to me to a Break-Out clone that was on my first
PC.
Go to: Bad Netizenship.