Just about everyone has one favorite Christmas memory. Mine is from my childhood, and it involves perhaps the most unexpected yet anticipated gift my parents had ever given me. Why is this coming up on March 5th you ask?
As I had responsibility for Zachary tonight, we were playing a game on the Wii. That was this year's big unexpected gift; Chris' way of recreating a part of my childhood so that Zachary would have a memory with the same feeling.
It was 1982, and I had been bugging my parents for a video game console since a friend of mine had previously received an Odyssey II and others had Atari 2600's. It was all the rage. In their efforts to placate and entertain the family my parents had gone through earlier consoles, including some of the earliest.
We had a Magnavox that played only 3 games, all basically some version of Pong. I still remember it was this bright, school bus yellow color.
We also had a console from Sears which had 7 or 8 games on it, and this one played on our little 13
inch color television. Wow! 8 versions of breakout / pong. In COLOR!!! (There was pinball and that was pretty cool. I'd actually play it again today if we had it.)
The Piece de Resistance' came that Christmas. The truly funny part is of course, as I have learned as a parent, nothing ever goes the way you plan or envision it when you have kids; not even Christmas. True to form, Zachary opened one of the Wii games first before opening the package with the console itself. Flashback! I did the same thing and the look on my mother's face was so crestfallen that only someone else in their shoes could appreciate. You think they're going to open the largest box under the tree, but noooooo!
What is more amazing is I had not heard of this system, so I was in shock. Of course, there were a lot less outlets for information and access for children to get at it in those days. Their best advertising came on the back of comic books.
Now kids can tell you the revised release date of the next Sony Playstation XVII and what engineering problems have set back production and who the chief designer is. All I knew at the time was my parents had gotten me the coolest gift ever. The first box I actually had unwrapped was the game Star Raiders. The console came with Super Breakout, and my folks had also gotten Missile Command and Centipede to go with it. My brother Michael, who was in college at the time, stayed up past 2 am playing and I can still hear my father berating him for it after he unwisely mentioned at the breakfast table that he "could still see the contrails from the missiles" when he closed his eyelids. We always opened gifts on Christmas Eve, then spent all of Christmas day tinkering/playing around with our haul from the night before. The graphics on this at the time were state of the art, and made my friends' 2600s look like clunkers in comparison.
Eventually through friends who no longer played their systems and simply gave me their game cartridges I had quite a collection. I unwisely gave them all away before I went to college to my then brother-in-law who still had a working system. The one major (underscore MAJOR) flaw of this product were the controllers which broke if you simply stared at them too hard. He soon became my sister's ex, and gone was a library of over 30 games(Star Trek, Star Wars, Kangaroo, Popeye, Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom, and my all time favorite, Montezuma's Revenge just to name a few) which would now cost me a bundle to try to re-collect. I still have a system, a guilt gift which Chris purchased off of Ebay several years ago after she insisted I throw away my first console because if you couldn't play it, what was the point in keeping it? Of course, that was before the advent of the internet and the explosion of Ebay as a source to find almost anything. Who knew? It still lies dormant, as some of the pieces still don't work. Eventually I will have the money to devote to getting it back up and running, then I can show Zach what Daddy's state-of-the-art video game was when he was a boy. He'll stare at it for 2 minutes, then we'll go back to playing BoomBlox. "Watch where you're swinging that controller boy!"
< Sigh>
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