Atari, How I Loved Thee

Over the weekend, I read an interesting article in Harper's Magazine about Billy Mitchell, the first person to achieve a perfect game in Pac-Man. In the late 1970s, Mitchell ran through all 256 levels of the game on his first and only Pac-Man, achieving a score of 3,333,360. The fact that he did it without losing even a single Pac-Man blows my mind. The Harper's article got me thinking about the rapid evolution of video games in recent years and about my first video game love, Atari.

Before there was Playstation 3, before there was the Xbox, before there was Grand Theft Auto IV, there was Atari. For those of you too young to remember, Atari was the first video game console embraced by the masses, a simple construct comprising a small console about 14 x 10 x 2 inches, two joysticks, and two paddle controllers that were used for games that were inappropriate for a joystick. Compared to the space age Xbox and Playstation, the Atari console looks like a phonograph record player from the 19th Century.

It might seem funny to people who are used to the unbelievably complicated games of today like Halo and GTA, with their complex virtual worlds, true-to-life graphics, and sophisticated plots, but when Atari first came out, it was kid heroin. Everyone wanted it. We shook our parents down, demanded, pleaded, and finally begged for Atari, like a junkie trying to score that capper hit.

"P-p-please Mommy, Daddy, p-p-please. Can we get Atari, please? Can-we-get-it? Can-we-get-it? Please-can-we-get-it? Please-please-please-can-we-get-it?"

When our desperation grew, we began to sound like addicts jonesing for that next score. We had no shame.

"C'mon Pops, just one hit, man! I just wanna a taste, Moms! Just wanna wet mah beak a little -- c'mon, Pops! Score me some dat Combat or Asteroids... sheeyit, I'll even take some Pong, man! Just gimme SOMETHIN'!"

It was pathetic and sad. And when we finally got Atari? When our parents finally broke down, caved in to the guilt, to the imploring of their whiny offspring and bought us the fucking thing? Ohhhh what a scene! First, there was the opening of the box on Christmas or a birthday, a ritual that was heralded by whoops and crazed laughter -- and sometimes even tears of joy -- for we already knew the size and approximate weight of the console. We'd sized it up 1000 times at Child World or Sears. When we made that first rip in the gift wrap and saw the Atari symbol, it was ecstasy. Our eyes rolled way into the back of our heads and we thrashed on the ground like epileptics in the throws of a seizure. Then there was the agony of the hookup, which seemed to take forever. We stood behind our fathers as they fiddled with the wires and tried to make sense of the newfangled toy. We examined their performance and huffed and puffed impatiently with the critical eye of a Porsche owner supervising a transmission overhaul at Midas.

Once the console was hooked up, our parents never saw us again. We locked ourselves in our rooms and, for the next several weeks, busied ourselves with the two games that Atari came with -- Pong and Combat!. I remember closing myself in my room and playing those games for hours. Sometimes half a day. Sometimes whole days. I played and played and played. Played until my wrists ached and I couldn't move the fingers on my right hand (which is still my favored hand for wrist-related activities). Today they call it carpal tunnel. Back then they called it "being addicted to video games." In less than a week, I developed thick red calluses on my left thumb and forefinger, which I used to hold the joystick and press the red button for shooting. I literally had to force myself to take a break and put the joystick down for awhile. It's not easy for a boy, much less a man, to put down his joystick when he enjoys playing with it so much. Cough.

I played Pong and Combat for a few weeks, tolerated their absurdly crude graphics for as long as the games remained a novelty. Pong is the most basic video game ever made. It featured two small lines on either side of the screen and a dot for a ball. That's it. You played it like tennis or air hockey and the goal was to try to get the dot past your opponent. Pretty simple. The computer memory required to generate Pong was so miniscule that today, the Playstation game Test Drive (which I have) uses Pong as a filler to keep you busy while a new Test Drive game is loading. God forbid you get a few seconds of waiting time to gather your thoughts before your next game. You get about 90 seconds of Pong, so you never finish a game, but you don't care because that's not why you're there. Still, when I saw it for the first time -- 1978 Atari crashing into 2002 Playstation 2, my head spun, and I momentarily forgot where I was. It was a video game time paradox.

Combat! was little better than Pong. You drove a tank or flew a plane -- or three planes that flew together simultaneously -- and tried to destroy your opponent's tank or plane. Your tank was a box with a nose; your plane was a + that shot tiny dots across the screen. Not exactly Metal Gear material.

When we got sick of Pong and Combat!, which didn't take long, we demanded that our parents buy us Space Invaders and Asteroids at $40 a pop. Then Kaboom! Then Activision football. Then Venture. Then Pitfall. Then the joysticks broke and we demanded new joysticks.

My favorite game, by far, was Warlords. Warlords was best when you played it with four people. Each person had a king who occupied a corner of the television screen. Each king was surrounded by a multi-leveled wall, like in Brickbreaker. The object was to protect your king by controlling your "guard" in front of the wall using the paddle controllers. You could either deflect the bouncing ball or hold it to throw at someone's king at a moment of your choosing. The ultimate goal was to break through the walls of the other players to kill their king and be the last man standing.

Here's the box it came in:



Here's what it actually looked like:



Impressive, eh? Yeah, yeah, it's crude, I told you. But you need to think of it in its proper context and time. Anyway, what made Warlords fun was that it was one of the few Atari games you could play with four people, and for that reason, it was the game most likely to lead to a fight, particularly when two or three people formed an alliance and ganged up on someone, like on Survivor. Alliances were crucial in Warlords, but unlike on Survivor, Warlord alliances were public and created on the spot, and with much taunting. It wasn't about strategy. It was about revenge. Picture this. You're sitting there with Matt, Tom, and Lee, all of you in front of the t.v., paddle controllers in hand. In your mind, you're still remembering how Matt embarrassed you the day before by telling the class that you had a crush on Celeste, after he'd promised to keep it to himself. Or maybe Tom pissed you off by telling Mrs. Murphy that you were trading Star Wars cards during recess, which was forbidden. So what if it happened three months ago? Warlords was your chance to pay these a-holes back. Settle some old scores. So when the ball came to you, you caught it with your controller, announced the object of your wrath, obtained confirmation of potential alliances, and proceeded to bombard the living fuck out of your antagonist's wall until you demolished his king.

I tell you here and now, at nearly the age of 40, fewer things in my life have been as gratifying as when I destroyed a childhood friend's Warlord king with malice aforethought.

Like all things in this world, however, Atari eventually went the way of the dinosaur. First it was replaced by Intellivision, a game with marginally better graphics and games than its predecessor. No matter. I demanded Intellivision as soon as it came out. I still remember playing spirited games of Intellivision basketball at my friend Lee's house at 2 a.m. during sleepovers. Then came Colecovision, which was light years ahead of Atari and Intellivision, but also far more expensive. Colecovision was the first video game to come close to duplicating the games in the Arcade. The graphics were unbelievable. I remember playing Zaxxon and drooling at how similar it was to the real thing. My parents drew the line at Colecovision, so if I wanted to play, I had to go to a friend's house. When I was in law school, Sega Genesis came out. If you've seen the movie Swingers, and in particular, the scene where they're playing Sega Hockey and Vince Vaughn induces a hockey player fistfight when his opponent briefly gets up to pay the pizza bill, that scene is so true to life, it's scary. When Shamrock and I saw the movie together, he said, Oh my God, that's us!

Sega is pretty much where I got off the video game train. I bought the first Playstation, then the second, but I have yet to buy the third. The games have gotten so friggin' complicated that this old coot can't deal with them anymore. I just don't have the time or inclination to sit home for hours and master Grand Theft Auto -- the original of which I tried and found boring as hell -- or Halo or whatever else. I enjoy the simple games, games that are easy to control, driving games like Gran Turismo, war games like Medal of Honor, and of course, Guitar Hero, which I absolutely love. But I don't play even these with the passion I once had for Atari and Colecovision. I know I'll never spend the time to get really good, so my play is half-assed. I've had Medal of Honor for 5 years and I can't finish the damn thing.

I don't know if it's that the games have gotten too hard or I've gotten too old. Maybe both.