My First System

While I was in elementary school, my friends down the street got an Atari 2600. I thought it was awesome to be able to play Asteroids at home (plus, I was better at this version than the arcade version). We had a lot of fun playing Air Sea Battle, also.

Later that year, my dad calls from a friends house. He says he found an Atari at a yard sale. My brother and I were both excited, and we pretty much sat on the floor staring at the door, waiting for him to get home.

When he gets home, my dad hands me this brown box with two knobs and tells me to hook it up to the TV. “But dad, this isn't an Atari.” “Yes it is,” he says, “it says so right there in the middle of the box.”

I hooked it up, put in the four D-batteries, and there they were, two paddles on the screen, with two big zeros. Imagine my excitement. Things got even better, when a friend told my dad that Pong was known to burn images into a TV screen, so we had to move it from the color television to an old thirteen-inch black and white that we still had.

So my first home game system was Pong. Well, actually, Super Pong, so we had the four different “games” to choose from.

I held on to it for a long time, but eventually sold it around 1995, along with my other two Ataris and games, to a guy in Santa Monica, who saw my ad in The Recycler. (I used the money to buy my first home computer. Yes... I didn't get my first computer until I was 25, that will be in another story). I can still remember the guy simply for the reason he was buying it: it was going to be a party game. He and his friends thought it was trippy to watch the game play back and forth in attract mode (with all of the colors changing) while they were buzzed and high.

I kind of miss it now, since it was my first. Sniff.

Update: I was able to get an almost mint one off eBay. It now sits at my office at work.