The Atari 2600
My brother and I get an Atari 2600. I don’t remember if it was for Christmas or not. We got the game much later because Activision was already making games for it. I was surprised at how much more I lked all their sports games. I even wanted to send a best time in downhill skiing by taking a photo of the TV screen. Took the photo, but never sent it in.
I put a lot of time into this thing as I guess all kids do whether or not they turn out to be computer programmers. Many games I just about memorized how to win. With my extremely poor memory skills, I had to play quite a bit. It just seemed like a puzzle to be solved. Other games had computer opponents who were terrible. I mean I could just kick the computer’s ass in boxing. Turns out, I kicked about everyone’s ass I played.
The Decathelon was a game that presented physical factors into playing the game. The 100m dash; keep flipping the joystick back and forth as fast as you can for the 10-15 seconds it took to run the race. 400m Dash – 45-60 seconds. Blisters began to apear the first day. We tried wearing gloves. Vaseline on the joystick (Wow does that sound bad.). Nothing worked. Running the 1600 meters nearly killed you probably how it does most decathelites. Not sure why but I managed to take one of the joysticks apart and noticed some pretty simple connections. What would happend if I could use some other button system to over-ride this? My father, the avid electronic junk collector, had this old desk top calculator. The ones with the roll of paper that people in accounting still use to this day. It had large enough buttons. I cut them off the board. Nice little configuration of two buttons to simulate the back and forth/running with the joystick and another buttton set a little further apart to use for the jumping and throwing actions. I even found a plug and socket with enough connections to detach this when not in use. This came from an old operator switch board they were throwing out at US Steel and my father brought home for the parts (The cabinet became my work bench and one of the hundreds of parts ended up in my Atari joystick.). Well this think worked. No more blisters. No more pain. I think I broke the world record in every event. Not really fair so the game was no longer a challenge.
Then there was football. Early on I was not very good at Atari’s crappy version of football, but soon beat those who had more experience. Activision’s football had this idea that you told each player what to do (All 4 of them) instead of calling a set play. It was a lot more like sandlot football. “OK, everybody go deep on one. Horrible kid, you stay in and block.” In our college room, I ruled this game. Finally, one of my friends finally beat me. Everyone was there. It was the Super Bowl of computer football. Could someone “finally” beat Jeff. It happened. My reign of terror was over. I don’t think anyone ever played again. What was the point?
