Which Games Did You Play as a Child?
I have always liked playing a variety of games. I was born before video games were invented, so I started out playing the classics like Checkers, Chinese Checkers, Dominoes, Jax, Pick-up Stix, Tiddly Winks, and Yahtzee.
Our family played a lot of board games, too, like Clue, The Game of Life, Monopoly, Operation, Parcheesi, and Scrabble.
When I was younger, I played easy card games like Go Fish, Old Maid and War, but as I got older, I moved up to card games such as Crazy-8s, Rummy, Skip-Bo, Solitaire, and Uno.
While in school, during recess with my friends, we would jump rope and uses rhymes to count how many times we jumped without missing.
We also did a lot of hand clapping games with rhymes like “Say Say, Oh Playmate” and “Miss Mary Mack”.
The first “video game”, Pong, came out when I was in elementary school. It was a simple game console that connected to your TV and had two knobs you turned to control the paddles that would hit the square ball back across the screen to your opponent. I remember my siblings and I would get in trouble for hogging the TV while playing it. Not long after that, arcades starting popping up at malls everywhere and you could find many other games to play for a quarter. I played games like Asteroids, Defender, Donkey Kong, Joust, Space Invaders, and Pac Man.
Later, we got the Atari Video Computer System and could play all those cool games at home. Our grandparents got smart, though, and put a second TV in the family room so they could actually watch theirs again.
When I was a senior in high school, we got a Commodore 64 computer and I discovered the popular interactive fiction games published by Infocom. These were text adventure games without graphics. The game would provide a description of your location and you typed what you wanted your character to do. Each game could be different, depending on which choices you made. Of the ones shown above, my favorites were The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on the book by Douglas Adams, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which was a story that started out in a bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio in 1936. You got to choose which gender your character was by which restroom you went into, and you could choose your level of naughtiness, either tame or lewd. I actually have the entire set of Infocom games on 3 1/2 in floppy discs, though I haven’t powered up that old desktop computer in so long, I’m not even sure if it would work.
HootOwl Handicrafts 