Christmas 1981
1981 was an interesting year. One item in particular changed my life utterly.
Hint: It was not my new sweater.
Sears used to have a kiosk with a bunch of 2600 games built into it. This was before the mall even had an arcade in it. I used to make certain that I got included on any trip that went anywhere near Sears, for this reason. I didn’t even have to play it, I just stood there and worshiped the thing silently.
My prior video game experience was Space Invaders, Battlezone, and Asteroids which were in the front lobby of Fischer’s Big Wheel, which was a small K-mart style store in rural Malvern Ohio. I had to stand on a milk crate to reach the Battlezone visor. Before these games were there, they had a bulldozer game where you pushed aquarium sand into holes.
I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen one of those, so there it is.
I was snooping through the cupboards one day in late November, and I found a Space Invaders cartridge up above the refrigerator. OMG OMG OMG! They had to have gotten me an Atari! Wooooo! I think mom was aware that I was onto something, perhaps because my incessant year long campaign of “subtle hint dropping” ceased just a month before Christmas. Or she noticed the game was out of place, or who knows. But she knew I knew.
7am Christmas morning, we raced downstairs. I was cool, confident, and utterly certain I was going to be playing some serious Atari that day. I opened the little stuff. Tried on the clothes. Didn’t even moan about the socks and underwear. Today was Atari day.
Except it wasn’t. After everything was unwrapped and accounted for, the gods of video games had screwed me over. How was this at all possible? I was destroyed. Everything I thought I knew about the world and my place in it was falling apart in the most profound disappointment. Oh god, why? How could I have been mistaken. This was a sealed-deal, my dues had been paid. AAAAAAAAAUUUUURGH!
I didn’t say anything. Deflated, I cleaned up the wrapping paper and tried to casually mope upstairs to die in the privacy of my own room. As I walked in the door, I saw a big wrapped box under my bed.
It was in the next minutes that I came to understand that my parents were the most wonderful people and most cruel prankster assholes of all time. I was sorta over it by the time the picture above was taken, though.
