It’s astonishing how ubiquitous video games have become in today’s society. My boys frequently remind us how we are the only family in the civilized world that does NOT own a game system. Before you shed a tear for them, please know that they are not suffering. They do have supervised access to two computers and play video games on a somewhat regular basis.
The graphic cards required by most games today are nothing short of miraculous in how they mimic reality. In spite of these advances, I have to laugh when I think of the good old Atari 2600 we grew up with. Commanding a blob of pixels to move orthogonally through a multi-colored lego-like universe, with paddle or some-time functioning joystick, was impressive to us. We could play Combat, Asteroids, Missile Command, Pitfall and Breakout for hours at a time. I doubt that the crude compilation of chunky pixels that comprised most game graphics of the early 80s would hold a kid’s attention for more than 2 nanoseconds today. It would be interesting to see the sales demographics for the re-release of some of those classic games I grew up with. I have a suspicion that most were sold to “kids” my age.
