h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My memories of the Sears TV Game are a little vague, consisting mostly of begging my best friends parents to let us stay up a little longer to play it when I spent the night at his house. That ping pong game was pretty addictive at the time, although I've tried to play Pong since then and was bored stiff after about five minutes.

Then came the Atari 2600. I was about eight or nine at the time, and arcade games were just beginning to become popular. Games in those days were always compared to arcade games. I guess the desire was to have arcade-quality games in one's home, but for me, something else was happening. My favorite games at the time were those that conveyed a sense of place, exploration or story. Berserk, Star Raiders, Adventure, Cosmic Ark, Demon Attack, Yar's Revenge and Pitfall are all titles that come to mind when I try to recall great moments in Atari-induced escapism. These games all had something that generic arcade ports didn't-they all made me feel like I was somewhere else doing something else. Of course, in those days, it took a lot of imagination and suspension of disbelief to "fall into" a video game. I guess imagination is something with which I've always been endowed in excess, so no worries there. I was getting something out of those games that previously I had only been able to get through books and (at that time) very few movies and television programs-only here the experience was interactive. A new obsession was born.