Saturday, June 10, 2006

'80s Flashbacks

If you played any of the following arcade games...
  • Pac-Man
  • Space Invaders
  • Ms. Pac-Man
  • Galaga
  • Frogger
  • Centipede
  • Dig-Dug
  • Galaxian
  • Q-bert
  • Pengo
  • Donkey Kong
  • Asteroids
  • TronTapper
  • BreakoutTetris

...you might like these '80s Music and Nostaligia Links.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

love Galaga

Anonymous said...

My weirdest talent ever, and most perplexing, was my skill at video games back in the 80s. I wasn't a computer geek or "techie" or anything even close to that back then, but I could master any video game placed before me. It was creepy.

Later I found out I was a virtuoso computer programmer and can literally think in computer code. I've made a nice living making machines think.

So it all made sense.

At my frat house at Indiana U. in 1981 we had the first Pac-Man arcade game and I could play all day on one quarter. I once scored about 2 million on Galaga at a video arcade near Fort Benning, GA. I think my record on Centipede was about 3 million. I only lost when I got bored and quit. I don't even know how. I could just see the patterns in the computer code. Computer games (especially the early arcade games you list) are not really about manual dexterity or even hand-eye skills; it's all about seeing the computer code patterns and mastering them. It used to creep people out to watch me play with such ease and not even give a shit. I was embarassed I could do it. I could never explain it either.

My best were Tron and Tempest. I could rip through them and never lose unless I simply got bored.

I HATE video games and quit playing them about 15 years ago; I never cared that I was really good at them. But for a few years I was a local hero at the arcades in my hometown and near the Army bases where I served. When home computer games came out I would "solve" every one of them and try to beat the programmers at all their tricks. And then I just grew tired of wasting time on such silly shit and have never looked back.

Jessica said...

MCS,

You're unusual in that your brain is verbal and math oriented.

There was an air show in my area this week and it made me think of you. I wondered if you had ever gone to an air show since your experience with that nightmare in Germany.

Jessica said...

MCS, you're missing out. There are some really fun video games out there nowadays and we have em all!

Anonymous said...

Well, Jess, the work I do now is kind of like video games, except the automated systems I create exist in the real world.

It's much more fun.