Life Bytes: Chapter One

If you missed the introduction to all this and have no idea what the hell is going on, there’s a brief prologue sort of thing over here. I know I promised to start this series last week, but Major Life Developments happened of the sort that require significant life changes and a much-need boost to my salary. But more on all that later. Right now, lets get down to Life Bytes.

In The Beginning…

I missed the first generation of video games on account of having not been born yet. I blame my parents for that one, and it’s a resentment I carry for a few reasons. First, by waiting until 1974 to have the unprotected sex that would eventually lead to my glorious birth in 1975, they made me miss all the good music of the ’60s and most of the ’70s. By the time my ears were my own and I could start choosing what sounds went into them, it was the ’80s, which was great if you loved the keytar, but not much good for anything else. Second, Bruce Lee had been dead a full two years before I was finally expelled from my mother’s uterus in a lonesome hospital in a miserable corner of the great state of Sorry-We-Gave-You-Dubya-xas. And that’s no way to come into the world.

Still, my parents did eventually get around to making sweet ’70s love at some point, or I wouldn’t be here. So I’m pretty happy about that, even if I did miss all the best stuff of the past 50 years. Well, except for all the cool stuff of the ’80s and early ’90s, like computers and lasers and the space shuttle. And video games.

…there was Razzle Dazzle

I was barely five years old when I experienced two moments that would come to define the rest of my life. The second was the premiere of the best movie in the Star Wars franchise, but the first? The first was my introduction to video games.

My Dad brought home something called the Fairchild Channel F System II Video Entertainment Computer. I didn’t know why it was called the Fairchild Channel F System II Video Entertainment System, because we didn’t have an F channel on our television. I still don’t know why it was called the Fairchild Channel F System II With The Longest And Worst Product Name Ever System, but I’ve since concluded that it probably had something to do with the fact that, while the fine minds at Fairchild Semiconducter might have been familiar with the concept of marketing, they never quite got the hang of it.

Despite its horrible name, the Channel F was a great little system. It was capable of drawing in three distinct and exciting colors with five different background colors that came in varying shades of ugly. It was also capable of letting you play games against the computer, which set it apart from other game systems at the time that required human opponents because no one had figured out how to squeeze in enough raw computing power to create the awesome artificial intelligence necessary to play Pong. So it had that.

It also had a football game called Videocart-24: Pro Football, which stands as another exciting example of the brilliant marketing strategy of the Fairchild Semiconductor team. I loved the game, probably because my Dad would always play it with me. When you’re five years old, all you want to do with your life is whatever your Dad is doing with his. And my Dad was playing video games with me. I loved it.

The thing about Videocart-24: Pro Football was that it was a terrible game, with lousy graphics and even worse game play. I could be wrong here, but in the window of my memory, you didn’t actually play much in the way of football when you played Videocart-24. Instead, you selected from a list of plays, then watched as the computer ran them. I think you could grab hold of one of the monstrous cylindrical sextoy joysticks and push a button to make one X pass the square ball to another X, but the computer would decide if one of the Os intercepted it. That’s how I remember it, anyway.

And I remember the play I always used to run…and when I say that I always used to run it, I mean that I always ran it. Every. Single. Time.

That play was “Razzle Dazzle” (or at least that’s what I called it), and I thought it sounded really cool. For his part, my Dad never got tired of letting me run the same play over and over again, always acting surprised each and every time he let one of my Xs razzle the holy dazzle out of one of his Os. He did this for two reasons. First, because he was a man of endless patience. And second, because he was a pretty awesome father.

Whenever I try to recall my earliest memories, I always see myself sitting on the hideous 1970s carpet of our family room with a ridiculous controller in my hand and my Dad by my side. We’re in front of the TV with our backs to the couch, I’m running Razzle Dazzle again for the 500th time, and my Dad is smiling.

So am I.

These days, I play the current version of Videocart-24 with my own five-year-old, only it’s called NCAA Football 2012 now. And we use the a 1-button mode.

Blue 42! Blue 42! Hut, hut...ah, screw it. I hate Tic Tac Toe.

The Coming of the Wars

Growing up in the ’80s meant that Star Wars was not only part of your childhood; in some ways, it was your childhood. Sure, the scene in E.T. where Elliot describes his Star Wars toys to the little alien troll with the phallic neck might have just been a bit of product placement by George Lucas’ good buddy Steven Spielberg, but it was also honest. Show me a young boy in the ’80s whose world didn’t revolve around Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and I’ll show you a religious zealot being home-schooled in the Appalachians, just before he writes a manifesto and blows something up in his underwear. The fact is, if you were a kid in the ’80s – and especially if you had a penis – you dug the ‘Wars. End of story.

My first exposure to the saga came about during the re-release of what eventually came to be known as Star Wars: Episode 1: A New Hope. My parents, probably still feeling pretty lousy that Hendrix had been dead and cold for half a decade before they finally got around to creating me, took me to see the film at a local drive-in theater. If you ever went to a drive-in back then, you already know that the experience was pretty great. If, however, you weren’t fortunate enough to make it to one before they were all turned into parking lots and driving ranges, it was pretty much the same as going to a movie today. Except that the surround sound was a tiny speaker hooked onto your dad’s window (if he was driving), and if the person next to you kept talking throughout the movie, you could just punch her in the arm until she shut up…or told on you. Because she was your sister. In short, drive-ins were awesome. I miss them.

By the time the Empire struck back in 1980, the drive-in was already history and my parents took me to a General Cinema, instead. It had, as I remember, two screens. I don’t remember what the other one was showing, because I was only interested in seeing what was going to happen to Luke, Han and Leia. I won’t recount the movie here, but if you’re any sort of geek, you’ll know that Empire was the best of the series, probably because Lucas had a hard time getting his way with Irvin Kershner. And as the prequels proved, any time no one says, “No!” to George Lucas, a baby Jar-Jar is born.

I lived and breathed Star Wars as a kid, especially after I found out that Vader was Luke’s father. (OMG! SPOILERS!) My friends and I would act out the scenes as little boys do, only ours usually ended up more violent than somebody just getting their hand chopped off. I was always careful with my toys, though. I still have most of them, including an original AT-AT (which I never have and never will refer to as a ‘Walker’), the Death Star playset and even a plastic Ewok village. Yeah, I liked the Ewoks. Sue me.

I had that one friend though, as everyone does, who didn’t give two shits about my toys or their relative safety. Thanks to him, I have one broken TIE Fighter, two broken X-Wings and a semi-functional landspeeder with a missing gear shift that’s been stuck in ‘hover’ mode since 1983. I’ve never forgiven that little bastard. And I never will.

Discovering My Joystick

But as much as I loved Star Wars, I loved video games more. Which is why, on one sorry day in 1982 when I home from school due to a lucky outbreak of chicken pox, I was so excited when my Dad brought home an Atari 2600 from the electronics store where he was working at the time. He’d rented it for me since I didn’t have much else to do with my time other than scratch in places I shouldn’t, so I took to it instantly.

He didn’t bring home much in the way of games, though. In fact, the only cartridge he rented along with the system was some sort of typical blast-the-bad-guys-from-the-bottom-of-the-screen type of affair, but I loved it all the same. I played the hell out of that game, so much so that when it came time to return the beautiful wood-grained monster, my Dad just bought it from the store. And there it stayed in our house for the next many years, tucked away in what we would eventually come to refer to as The TV Room.

Not long after I’d recovered from chicken pox, my sister and I came down with Mononucleosis. Given its common name of “The Kissing Disease” this was unfortunate for many reasons, and did nothing to help my confusion over that scene in Empire when Luke does a little tongue wrestling with Leia because Obi-Wan was a little too slow figuring out that it might be a good idea to let the kid know the princess is his sister before the two start banging in the the back seat of the Millennium Falcon. But yeah, I didn’t get it from my sister. Or maybe I did and I’ve blocked it out. Either way, let’s move on.

I had a cousin who was working for Motorola around that time, and it turned out that his company was one of the primary chip manufacturers for Atari cartridges. This meant that he had access to virtually every game that came down the pipeline, including some that never made it to market. All it took to play them was an open cartridge with a ZIFF socket, and you could swap out one chip for another and play every game you ever wanted. And I did, just as soon as he brought me several stacks of black foam with chips stuck in them. I went from having three, maybe four games to somewhere around 150. And I became very, very popular at school.

At first, no one believed that I had that many games. My parents weren’t rich or divorced and showering me with gifts to buy my greedy love or anything, so there was no logical reason why I should be so lucky as to have 150 Atari games. It took the testimony of a few friends who’d witnessed the glory of my stacks of chips to win the confidence of my 2nd grade classmates, but after that, everyone wanted to come to my birthday party.

So it kinda sucked when the whole thing came to a screeching halt after the big video game crash of ’83 and no one wanted to play with me anymore.

Which led to one of the best things that ever happened to me: the Apple ][.

Or at least a pretty awesome clone.

Click here to read Chapter Two.