Favorite Christmas Presents, part three

As I consider my list of all time favorite Christmas presents, there is only one that wasn't given to me by "Santa Claus."

In December of 1979, my older brother Tom returned for his first leave from the United States Navy. I guess it was the first time Tom had earned an adult's salary, and he was very generous in his Christmas gifts. And what he gave to me and my two younger brothers was an Atair 2600 video game system.

Ah, who grew up in the late 1970's or early 1980's and didn't have an Atari 2600? So I guess I don't need to describe it in great detail, but for those who perhaps didn't grow up then, Atari 2600 was the first successful cartridge-based home video game system. It came with two games, Combat (a tank game) and Video Olympics (6000 versions of Pong), and it was a blast. Over the course of the next four or five years we purchased forty or fifty different games, each averaging about $15 each. Which means I spent about $600 of my own money on video games. So maybe I shouldn't be so grateful to Tom after all. Look at all of the money I wasted.

In any event, we certainly got our money's worth out of the system, playing it so much that we wore out multiple joysticks and paddles. Here are some of my favorite games:

1. Atari basketball: Great one on one game that was more playable than later 5 on 5 games
2. Atari football: You could sack the quarterback by running your safety through the bottom of the screen and having him come out the top of the screen. He'd be in the backfield but wouldn't be counted offsides.
3. Pitfall: Sort of an Indiana Jones-type game. For whatever reason, you spent a lot of time jumping on alligator heads.
4. Space Invaders: The first "killer app" in the home video game era.
5. Activision boxing: It was fun to beat people up.
6. Asteroids: Very similar to the Atari arcade game
7. Pac-man: This game was actually the beginning of the end of the Atari system. It was such a poor port from the arcade to the home system, and it was a sign that there were too many games coming out too quickly. Still, I thought it was fun.
8. There's an 8th game I can't remember the name of. But the point of the game was to catch bombs in buckets as a striped convict at the top of hte screen dropped them. Sounds weird, but it was fun. And it was a great game for teaching focus as you almost had to go into a trancelike state in order to keep up with the little guy as he dropped things. WAIT: I just googled "atari convict bombs bucket" and found the title right away: It was called Kaboom.

So despite the money that I spent on all of the games, I still think fondly about the system. One of the funniest things, though, is how amazingly simple all of the games were. There are places on the Internet where you can download an Atari simulator and then download the ROM's of the actual games and then play them on your computer (It's illegal, though, so don't do it. That's why I'm not including links to these sites). And every game I ever owned AND the simulator for the games could all fit on a single floppy disk. And I could fit 2,250 of those floppy discs on the DVD's that Nintendo Wii or Playstation 3 games come on today.

But this was the system that started it all, and it definitely would make the list of favorite Christmas presents!