You know the thrill you get when you unexpectedly find a five-dollar bill in a jacket pocket? I caught one of those thrills on Monday afternoon, when I realized I still had credits remaining on my Dave & Busters Power Card.

Did I spend Monday afternoon playing video games? You're good and goddam right I did, Buster Brown!

I only played old-school games. I like old-school games for their simplicity; no need to fuss with impossible six-button combinations when I can yank on a joystick and hammer on a FIRE button until my arm aches and my pockets are empty. Not that old-school games are easy. I couldn't clear the first level of Space Invaders, and Missile Command's third level caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth. But I did reach level 25 on Galaga. My 182,630 points there did not qualify me for the High Score list, unfortunately -- I desperately wanted to enter FUK for my initials.

Old-school games are bizarre. Modern game designers use souped-up hardware to create increasingly more lifelike games -- gamers today can adopt the personas of drug dealers, WWII soldiers, pro football players, or hundreds of other characters, and immerse themselves in realistic, cinematic storylines. Video games weren't always like that. Consider these classic games and how wonderfully weird and unreal they were:

• Dig Dug: You play a man in a space suit digging underground tunnels while fighting Pookas (fire-breathing dragons) and Fygars (red blobs wearing yellow goggles). You destroy these enemies either by dropping rocks on them or by pumping them full of air until they explode.
  
• Joust: You control an ostrich carrying an armored knight on its back. You attack enemy knights mounted on buzzards by colliding with them; if your knight's lance is higher than the enemy's lance, the enemy is unseated. Occasionally a pterodactyl enters the screen -- why not? -- and can only be destroyed by driving your knight's lance directly into its beak. Don't fly too close to the lava pits, lest a fiery hand reach out and drag you in!
  
• Pac-Man became so woven into 80s pop culture that no one (except Berke Breathed in this Bloom County cartoon) stopped to consider what an odd and dark social parable it was. You play a disembodied head dashing frantically through a maze, consuming like crazy, evading ghosts, and trying to grab an occasional bonus prize. The reward for succeeding is... you get to do it all over again, and again, and again, until you die. (It's not as hopeless as it sounds, though -- on July 3, 1999, a man named Billy Mitchell recorded the first perfect game of Pac-Man, scoring 3,333,360 points by clearing all 256 levels and eating every bonus prize plus every blue ghost.)
  
• Tempest: You control a pincer-shaped object darting around the rim of a tunnel suspended in space, firing blasts of energy into its depths to destroy geometrically-shaped enemies crawling up from the bottom. Disturbingly Freudian, that dark tunnel...

But the strangest old-school video game had to be Qix, a game so abstract that it's hard to describe. If you've never seen or played Qix, I implore you to go here and play for a bit. Never mind what your stupid boss says -- when you're lying on your deathbed, do you want to be able to say that you got some spreadsheet done on time or that you had a good time playing Qix?

+posted by Lawrence @ 7/07/2004 11:57:00 PM