To really appreciate what I was doing in the vintage video game scene ten years ago, in 1997, you really have to go back a year earlier than that. The brand new title Resident Evil for the newly released Playstation console came out in 1996 and basically invented the survival horror video game. I bought a Playstation console just to play that game in the summer of '96.
I've enjoyed video games pretty much my entire life up to that point. I bought the Atari Lynx and Jaguar consoles, and the games for them as they trickled out from the publishers. But Resident Evil was something new and exciting.
Unfortunately, for me anyway, Resident Evil also seemed to be the end of the excitement. A few months later, the game finished, there really weren't any other titles that I found compelling. I picked up Jumping Flash, Die Hard Trilogy, Spider, and a few others, but I never bothered finishing any of these games.
Enter eBay
Late 1997 (or maybe I'm cheating a bit, early 1998), someone showed me a newspaper article about this new website called “eBay”. Of peak interest, of course, was that I could get cheap video games there. For the heck of it I looked up Joust, one of my favorite games in the arcade when I was a kid.
I was amazed to discover that you could get this game for a system called the Atari 7800 for about $2. The system itself could be had for $10. Add on a few more fondly remembered games like Asteroids, Robotron and Food Fight, and we're still less than the price of one Playstation game that I wasn't particularly excited about anyway.
The games came and they were a total joy. Sure, the Atari 7800 couldn't keep up with the technical magic that was the Playstation, but that didn't matter. The 7800 played games just like I remembered from the arcade. You could play as little or as much as you want, and none of the games required more than an instruction card and one or two buttons. And they were cheap, and plentiful.
Then there's the “eBay Snowball” effect. After you play the very good Asteroids on the 7800, you come to discover that there's a video game that includes a vector screen just like in the arcade, the Vectrex. Gotta get one of those. Also, might as well pick up all of the games for the 7800, never know when there might be a sleeper hit.
And they look so nice in the shrinkwrap boxes, I should pick up a set of extras, just in case. Ooh, someone who used to work for Atari is auctioning a lab prototype. Might not ever see one of those again, better grab it now. A collector is born.
The Basement of Doom is Born
I wasn't married then but living with my engaged in a recently-purchased house in the suburbs. A nice house. The kind that doesn't have cardboard boxes of Atari cartridges laying in the middle of the living room floor.
An old desk, plastic shelves and a yard sale TV, and the “Basement of Doom” is born. Atari cartridges commingle peacefully with Vectrex and a nascent Sega collection. A random video game related mug or t-shirt finds its way in.
The basement isn't finished, and is in fact a bit dusty and cobwebby, but I had (and still have) a comfortable chair down there. At least it's below ground and cool in the summer.
Where I Wasn't
I wasn't married at the time, but that honestly doesn't make that much of a difference. But I didn't have kids. Sure, neighborhood kids came over and played games that were made before they were born. They're all in college now. Or graduated.
But my kids have made quite a difference. “Budget” was something of an alien term back then, as was “space”. Before kids, there was no such thing as an “inappropriate game”. Nor was anything you might exclaim, loudly, if the game was going particularly badly, or particularly well, inappropriate.
But now my kids are growing up playing Sonic next to Wii Sports, M*A*S*H next to Motorstorm. They know that fun is fun, no matter what the game looks like. Isn't that what it's all about?
2008 ben langberg, all rights reserved.