Tuesday, 22 May 2018

Earliest Video Game Memory

Way back in the mists of time, men were real men, women were real women and small furry... you get it.

I am old enough to remember an Atari 2600 clone, of sorts.. I don't think it was an Atari, it was wooden, had little silver post slider switches, and two detachable joysticks with a single button apiece (these had little cubby holes to fit into, my first experience with cables just being annoying and never, ever fitting back into the space that they came in when it was new). One of the only games that I distinctly remember was some kind of motorcross game - it might actually have been called 'Motorcross' - where you had three horizontal lines on the TV screen, and your little bike. Pressing the button at the right time made you do a wheelie over an obstacle on the track. I was very bad at games, even back then, and failed more often than I should have. That didn't matter. IT WAS A WONDEROUS THING!

The other was 'Tennis'. Or Pong, but it might not have been branded.

Thinking harder, I seem to remember there only being a few colours. The games on the 2600 seem to be too colourful, maybe it was even older than that. The motorbike game looked like this:



Except that was the bus-jumping game type (one of 4! Stunt Cycle, Motorcross, Drag Race and Enduro). That screen shot comes from the Atari Stunt Cycle Game, which looks like this:


But the console most definitely did not look like that. I could have sworn that it had cartridges - although maybe the games were built in (as were the little joysticks). I'd like to know what it was.