Twenty Five years ago, Pac-man was born.
Twenty Five years ago, Pac-man was born.
Boing Boing: Happy birthday, Pac-Man!:
I had a funny conversation with my buddy Chris (Papa Christo) the other day. He had a shirt on that said Tower Records Campbell – 30 year anniversary, with a date. And I looked at that date, and said, god dude, we worked there twenty five years ago.
Chris and I met at Tower, and I should do a whole entry about that. But we worked nights, in the posters/plants/bongs store. We both worked the closing shift, 3:30-midnight. And you know, we were nineteen, twenty, working nights, so what we did most nights on our ‘lunch’ break was drink. Sometimes we’d hit the mexican place, and drink shots and eat nachos. But more often, it was a burger and pizza place called “The Garret”
Now, that was where, when I was a younger teen, I played my first game of Pong, and then later a game no one remembers called Flim-Flam. But one day, they got this new game; a table-top thing called pac man. And it was perfect; we’d get a couple pitchers of cheap beer, a couple burgers, and he’d drink while I played, I’d drink while he played.
We’d drink and play for an hour, and like the old WKRP episode, we’d get better with each beer, for a while. But then we’d start getting worse with each beer, about the time lunch was up.
And Chris and I would wobble back across the street and take over running cash registers, selling bongs and pipes and scales, posters of Peter Frampton and Farrah Fawcett-Majors.
How can this be twenty-five years ago? Damn, we were young.
Oh! Table-top Pac-man! So that you can rest your beer on the top while you played.
You see kids today with their PSPs and you tell them how great that shit was, and they don’t believe you.
Then again, back then it was perfectly legal for me to drive home from high school, without a seatbelt on, while drinking a beer. And wave to the cops. New Orleans was special even for 1982.
I just played Pac Man Sunday night!! On an old 1982 game that was once in an arcade but is no longer…AND I remember The Garret. Before it moved. 😉
I was the MASTER of table top Space Invaders! I liked air hockey better than Pong. And, I just picked up one of those hand-held video games that you just plug-n-play on your TV ($20 at Target): Pole Position, Ms. Pacman, Asteriods (poor version), Galaga among others.
I especially like Adventure, that D&Dish Atari game.
D
You’re a fucking geek, whirlbrain.
If I got a Tempest machine in my living room, I’d never leave the house. Sigh. The good old games. Of course, that’s what i thought about some of the music i used to love that is now revealed to me as total mind numbing garbage, so I’m probably better off remembering it fondly and not actually playing it.
I actually had a spot-on port of tempest for mac and PC a few years back, but the thing was, without the twist-knob it wasn’t the same game at all. Like playing pac-man on a home console, you needed to be able to put your whole body into it.
With tempest, spinning that dial wildly while firing was what made the game.
Robotron gave me tendonitis before anybody knew what tendonitis was.
Oh hey… What about Joust? And Sinistar? I found a groovy website where you can play Joust and Centipede online, along with a few of those other ones we played in the 80s. If you wanna go check it out…
http://www.startinglinks.net/games/
Did you hear that Seven? *speaks to Jeri Ryan poster* Karl called me a geek. *pours beer into Darth Vader mask mug and rolls new Assasin character*