The Video Game Revolution and the Golden Age of Arcade Video Games... part two

I remember the first video game I ever saw. It looked fairly innocent, sitting in the lobby of a hotel; nothing could be farther from the truth. In essence, what I saw there that day was a herald of a future far weirder than I believe anyone could imagine outside the realms of science fiction. I didn’t realize exactly what I was seeing that day; that was I saw would change the world in ways I couldn’t imagine. Soon after, we began to see other games begin to pop up. Space Invaders was the next one I personally remember seeing. This was much better than a simple ball bouncing back and forth on a screen. What an improvement! Of course, it didn’t stop there. Then came Asteroids. This one was addictive as you can get. I spent hours and far too much of my money on Asteroids. I never could get the knack of that game as I saw a few people do. Some kids I knew could play that game for hours on one quarter. For those of mortals, these video game gods were to worshipped and admired. They were in a class of their own that we supplicants to knowledge wished to be ourselves some day. It was a privilege to stand and watch these gods at their play, casually swatting away their enemies, the flying rocks of Asteroids in this case, with careless abandon.

I wished to learn the secrets of these immortal bards, these sinless creatures whose main pitfall was to usually run out of time. It always engendered a chorus of groans from those watching when we would hear the dreaded words, “I’ve gotta get home. My mom is gonna kill me.” The god would then step aside and a favored acolyte would take over the helm of the ship, only to be slaughtered in slightly more time than one such as myself would be. The waiting audience would slowly melt away as the extra ships the god had built up slowly dwindled during the inept play of his lesser.