My earliest experience of interactive TV games was playing Pong and Star Chess. Everyone it seemed in the late 1970s had a Pong game or variant in their lounge. I was also lucky in that I also had Star Chess, a chess variant but with spaceships instead of the medieval court, the ability to shoot an enemy from a distance rather than “taking” the unit, as well as shields and other strategy elements that made it more random and interesting. One power you had was the ability to engage hyperspace on a unit and have it disappear for several turns and for it to appear randomly somewhere else on the board. What united both games was the requirement of two players, although some versions of Pong included a basic computer opponent who either was artificially dumb, slow or impossible to beat.
I remembered my excitement when my uncle arrived at our house one evening and hooked up his Atari VCS to our television. He plugged in a game cartridge and suddenly our static television went black, then lit up in garish slideshow of fluorescent colours. He hit the reset switch on the Atari and away we went. I remember being embarrassingly hysterical at watching coloured dots move around in response to my joystick commands. These weren't dots, but in my eyes they were tanks, planes, outlaws and knights fighting dragons. They were directly under my control, as I flittered between such games as Combat, Outlaw, Adventure! and Space Invaders. My uncle had only brought a small selection of these plastic game boxes, but it was enough. He only stayed the evening and was gone in the morning.
The next day all I could think about was Atari. I wanted to have an Atari VCS console, and I wanted to play these games. I quickly immersed myself in the, mostly American, advertising literature of the time and found out about all these fantastic games for the Atari console. Little did I realise back then that all of the literature was written by Atari themselves. The Atari was the most popular machine simply because it was the best known machine, but because of its high price and new nature of the technology no one else I knew owned one, let alone knew it existed. I am certain had my uncle not arrived that evening, I'd be none the wiser about consoles. It wasn't long before my parents started looking in shops that sold electrical goods and eventually found one that sold the Atari VCS as well as the games, and we encountered two hurdles.
Hurdle number one was the price. Even in 1980 these machines were very expensive, at over two hundred pounds for the main unit, and the games weren't cheap either at forty pounds each. At least they weren't until Activision started selling their own games at a slightly lower price point of of thirty pounds. I later found out that Activision was a company that made games that were programmed by ex-disgruntled Atari programmers who received little or no credit for their work. Activision would promote the creators of these games on the box cover and art so everyone knew who made it. We bought the machine which came with the Combat game free. We also bought Tennis as my dad was a big fan of the sport, Dragster because my brother loved cars, and I choose Space Invaders because I wanted to shoot things. All in all my parents spent almost four hundred pounds. Most of the games required two players, so it wasn't easy to play on my own. The computer Tennis opponent was rubbish and reminded me of a slightly better graphical version of Pong. So that just left Space Invaders. Freeway was a game we bought a few weeks later, and was a horribly flawed version of Frogger, but did allow for two players. Without any independent magazines reviewing these games there was no indication of how good they were. Hurdle number two was when to play. As there was only one television in our house at the time, I had to rely on me being the only one home to be able to play it, or nothing else on television for my parents to let me play on it. It didn't take long for me to be the only one interested in these games, as the allure of the limited gameplay eventually wore off.
I we didn't own many of the games, perhaps no more than half a dozen games, but we did borrow some from my uncle, I mostly choose single player games such as Superman and Adventure. I think my uncle either lost interest in Atari consoles or moved onto a newer system, as he eventually sold the whole lot to our grand parents, which we’d play every time we visited. Of all the games I played on the machine, the two I loved the best was Space Invaders (with its two bullet hidden cheat I could stay on and play that game for hours) and Adventure. Although I do recall spending an incredible amount of time learning all the various methods to beat Superman in record time. I think I managed it in under one minute and twenty seconds.
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