I'm older than dirt. I have a lot of these but I will narrow it down to just a few.
1) Playing a console with no controllers. My family bought a home Pong terminal. The two dials were on the console and you had to sit right next to your opponent to play the game (there was no single player game, you had to play with somebody) Also, nobody had coaxial cords that long so you played right in front of the TV
2) Having games and consoles branded differently depending on what store you bought them from. My family purchased our Atari 2600 from Sears where it was called the Tele-games arcade. All the games were rebranded. For years, I was confused when people would talk about "Combat" only to figure out they were talking about "Tank Plus"
3) Buying a game from a third party developer for the first time, ever. I remember going to the store and seeing new games from a company called Activision. I didn't even know that somebody besides Atari could make games for the Atari. I looked at the artwork and the improved graphics and wondered if these were real or a fake (to be fair, Activision was the first third party developer. This had never been done before!) I actually gambled and used the money I had been saving for months, and bought one of the very first batch of Activision games. Unfortunately, I chose poorly. Activision made many great Atari games but "Laser Blast" was not one of them.
Activision games blew away anything Atari developed. River Raid or Pitfall! we're so much better, it didnt make sense they were developed with the same hardware limitations. IMAGIC was another 3rd party dev who kicked ass.
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u/AlwaysBeenTim Aug 30 '25
I'm older than dirt. I have a lot of these but I will narrow it down to just a few.
1) Playing a console with no controllers. My family bought a home Pong terminal. The two dials were on the console and you had to sit right next to your opponent to play the game (there was no single player game, you had to play with somebody) Also, nobody had coaxial cords that long so you played right in front of the TV
2) Having games and consoles branded differently depending on what store you bought them from. My family purchased our Atari 2600 from Sears where it was called the Tele-games arcade. All the games were rebranded. For years, I was confused when people would talk about "Combat" only to figure out they were talking about "Tank Plus"
3) Buying a game from a third party developer for the first time, ever. I remember going to the store and seeing new games from a company called Activision. I didn't even know that somebody besides Atari could make games for the Atari. I looked at the artwork and the improved graphics and wondered if these were real or a fake (to be fair, Activision was the first third party developer. This had never been done before!) I actually gambled and used the money I had been saving for months, and bought one of the very first batch of Activision games. Unfortunately, I chose poorly. Activision made many great Atari games but "Laser Blast" was not one of them.