You think playing a game in VR is challenging?

The other day my nephew was playing some games with his VR headset. He asked me if I wanted a turn and said I would. Naturally, I was hopeless, and he commenced ridiculing me. To defend my reputation I launched into the tried and true “Well when I was your age, we didn’t have fancy games like that!”

This led to an entire discussion about what sort of computer games I played when I was young. I had to start with the waterful ring-toss game (yes, I know that is not how you spell waterfall). This game was simple, you pressed one button that would shoot a gust of air into the water-filled game, and you tried to get the rings onto one of the two hooks. It was fun for hours, no it really was, that was what we used to take on long car rides.

After that, my friend’s families got Atari systems and we got to play Pong or Space Invaders. Aside from getting a very cheap personal computer (with 32k of RAM) I didn’t get to play many exciting games at home.

But then in the summer of 1981, my cool child-less uncle came back from overseas and brought with him a Nintendo Game and Watch. This was a revolutionary development. It was a computer game that fit in my pocket, and I could play the game ANYWHERE! (Well, if you had enough battery power). It had a monochromatic LCD screen, but it was damn amazing.

My game was Popeye. You had to try to catch the bottles, pineapples, and spinach that Olive Oil was throwing to you from the boot of her car, and you must avoid getting clobbered by Brutus. It was an infuriating game that essentially just got faster and faster.

Then the battery would run out, you’d have to replace them, and they were those button batteries that cost a fortune back then, and it was hard finding a place that sold them, especially in rural Australia. I’m sure my parents cursed my uncle for that purchase. I had always been grumpy that my mother would make us keep our toys in their boxes until you get to modern times and see the resale value of items like these and how much more you get when you have the box it goes in.

My next game was the Futuretronics PacMan-1, as it was sold in Australia. Internationally it went under different names including Pac-Man, Puck Man, and Munchman. This game was obviously based on the arcade version that was driving the world crazy at the time. Eat up the dots, and avoid the ghosts. Basically, it just kept getting harder and harder and harder and faster and faster and faster.

The one saving grace of this one was that you could use batteries (4 x C-Cell batteries) or you could use a power adapter which meant that you didn’t have to worry about batteries dying when you were about to make a high score.

The game even had a selector switch for amateur or professional. That’s right, I could say “I am a professional PacMan player” and you would earn a world of respect… ok nobody really cared at all, it was just whether you wanted it to be hard or not.

The bright yellow color and the disc-shaped made it stand out. I was shocked when I recently collected it from my parent’s house to find out that it still worked. I have not improved any in the years since I last played, and the graphics certainly do not compare to modern standards, but it has been a fun stroll down memory lane.