Degeneration (no.2)

Thought I’ll try something different for this blog: So for the next following weeks, I’ll get a series going discussing my thoughts on the past console generations. Each Friday, I’ll go through past console generations and sharing my opinions and past experiences.

So let’s start at the beginning…with the second generation.

Atari 2600
They say that you always remember the very first console you’ve played. However, that precise moment has been lost to me in the mists of time (no doubt aided by copious amounts of alcohol consumed in the many years since). I never owned a console when I was a kid so I had to settle for a Commodore 64 – thus it was only through other people that I was able to play the machines made by Sega and Nintendo.
However, whilst the issue of the very first console I played may be debatable, I do recall playing the Atari 2600. So for the purposes of this series, the Atari 2600 will be the first console I’ve played.



I remember the Atari 2600 from my school days. On every Wednesday, I’ll spend the afternoon in after-school care where they had four Atari 2600 set up for use on creaky TVs. I often found the Atari’s a strange beast: They smelt of dust and age, the cartridges had to be beaten in with the force of a sledgehammer to make them work and half the controllers were defective.

Nevertheless, I played many games on many a Wednesday afternoon. Many of which assisted with my gamer education. I can still recall the thrill of actually winning a racing game with Grand Prix. I can still remember seeing the visual effects in Enduro and being awe-struck. I enjoyed the multiple battle options in Combat. And I can still point to Pitfall 2 as being the first game whose theme I committed to memory. Other moments I enjoyed was laughing when the chicken got splattered in freeway, running away from the polar bear in Frostbite, enjoying the vine swinging in Jungle Hunt only to get confused with the swimming challenge. Other enjoyable games were Ghost Manor, Mega Mania, Atlantis, Moonsweeper, River Raid and Seaquest.
I even got to play some conversions of noteworthy arcade games like Donkey Kong, Berzerk, Asteroids, Centipede and Space Invaders.

Looking back, these games are indeed primitive to look at now and show just how confined the programmers were with the tools they had to work with. Yet there is indeed a sense that these games appealed to me to then because they were fun to play.
They have a timeless quality that can still maintain attention even with nearly thirty years of gaming technological advancements. I guess with such (now) technology maintaining the fun factor was the highest of priorities. That being said, it’s easy to see how this whole business got started.
And of course, many of these games can even appeal to me as an adult – seriously, Asteroids is the only game in existence that, at the mere mention, can have me enthusiastically squealing like school girl (and I’m not afraid to admit at all).
And as they say, every journey has to start somewhere…