{"id":612,"date":"2009-03-12T07:00:30","date_gmt":"2009-03-12T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onceuponageek.com\/?p=612"},"modified":"2009-03-12T01:55:29","modified_gmt":"2009-03-12T05:55:29","slug":"atari-2600-vs-a-modern-day-9-year-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onceuponageek.com\/wordpress\/2009\/03\/12\/atari-2600-vs-a-modern-day-9-year-old\/","title":{"rendered":"Atari 2600 vs. a modern-day 9 year old"},"content":{"rendered":"

We found my wife’s old Atari 2600 at her mother’s house a few months back.\u00a0 I’ve been fiddling around with it off-and-on ever since.\u00a0 Sadly I discovered that it was missing some pieces.\u00a0 Thanks to what must have been divine intervention, I found the final piece I needed this past weekend.\u00a0 With great anticipation and trepidation I inserted the Pac-Man cartridge and clicked the power toggle to “on”.\u00a0 I didn’t realize it, but I was holding my breath hoping it would work.\u00a0 The moment between flipping the power toggle and seeing the result on the screen felt like an eternity, but was actually probably less than a second.\u00a0 Astonishingly my house was filled with glorious plinky music and my TV shone with a beautiful 128-color palette!\u00a0 Within seconds, I heard my wife shout from the other room, “I hear Atari!”\u00a0 This was amazing because she had no idea I was working on the machine, and she hadn’t heard the music from these games in probably 25 years.<\/p>\n

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Moments after the machine was turned on, my nine year old step-son came running into the room.\u00a0 Most likely he could sense that his fondness for video games is directly descended from this machine.\u00a0 Perhaps some sort of genetic race memory.<\/p>\n

We set him up with a few games: Pac-Man<\/a><\/em>, Space Invaders<\/a><\/em>, Video Pinball<\/a><\/em>, and Chopper Command<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Below you can see him tackling Space Invaders.\u00a0 On a related note, I was nearly in tears when I discovered that the cartridges no longer worked for Pitfall<\/a><\/em> and Q*bert<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

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We discovered very quickly that the controller’s response wasn’t very good anymore.\u00a0 I guess 25+ years of entropy had an effect.\u00a0 The next photo is him in mortal combat with Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde.<\/p>\n

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Chopper Command<\/em> and Video Pinball<\/em> seemed to grab his interest more than the slower-paced games such as Pac-Man<\/em> or Space Invaders<\/em>.\u00a0 I had forgotten with Space Invaders<\/em> that once you shot, you could not shoot again until your bullet had either hit something or run off the top of the screen.\u00a0 That is extraordinarily frustrating while playing.\u00a0\u00a0 He was pretty excited once we discovered how to set the auto-fire on Chopper Command<\/em> – more destruction in less time.\u00a0 Frustration was also compounded because the controllers weren’t responding as well as we’d like.<\/p>\n

Overall, he played Atari for about 30 to 35 minutes.\u00a0 While my wife and I were caught up in the nostagala, he was clearly underwhelmed by the graphics and playbability of these games.\u00a0 As soon as he could politely excuse himself, he was back to his Club Penguin<\/em> and Playstation II Lego Indiana Jones<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Tell the world about ONCE UPON A GEEK:<\/h3>