We had an Atari and IBM PC Jr up until '91, but back then people would just bring their Nintendo over. Played the Atari Pac-Man game whose sound clips were on any TV show with a video game scene well into the 2000s. Also played the heck out of Yar's Revenge, Combat, Pole Position and a couple of cheap / weird games, Keystone Capers and Tax Evaders, that Dad picked up at San Jacinto Mall Kay-Bee Hobby Toy Store, or maybe at Service Merchandise in between the jewelry section and Larry Holmes punching bags. The PC Jr was for MasterType, Homeword, King's Quest I and II, Black Cauldron, first-gen Carmen San Diego with the Almanac, and some arithmetic game called Monster Math that played Lilliburlero in the opening .midi clip. Any time we borrowed a game from our friends with Tandys the computer would show an error message on auto-boot saying the program required too much memory, at least more than the 128KB Ram.
We had,and I still have, a Magnavox Odyssey (the very first home video game console system) Then we got an Atari 2600 and a Colecovision Although I mentioned that Pitfall II was the best game on the 2600, we probably played Adventure more than any other game. Looking back, we really had a LOT of Atari games. Our other 2600 games (besides combat and space war) were.... Asteroids Barnstorming (Activision) Basketball Breakout Circus Atari Donkey Kong ET Frogger Grand Prix (Activision) Human Cannonball Jungle Hunt Kaboom! (Activision) Missile Command Outlaw Pitfall (Activision) Pitfall II (Activision) Plaque Attack (Activision) Raiders of the Lost Ark Riddle of the Sphinx Space Invaders Star Master (Activision) Star Raiders Street Racer There are probably more that I can't remember. Super Breakout Video Pinball Yar's Revenge
I played that and the Atari 2600 version of Frogger. I did actually like Intellivsion games better. Especially the B-17 Bomber with the voice module. I ended up waiting and getting the Colecovision with the Adam 'PC'. Montezuma's revenge was a great game. But most of them weren't that great. That's when I became a real PC gamer. I agree with @Roscoe Arbuckle about figuring out what to type in Leisure suit Larry and any of the early text or mostly text games. That part took longer than actually playing the game.
I remember those games. When we were 8-9 we went to our friends house that had them. I remember Custer had a huge doink and we would try to rape the tied up squall. The other one was one where we played the character of a whole that swallows semen. Kind of scary we knew what it all meant at that age. Then again my friend had a 14-15 year old brother that regularly did stuff to his girlfriend around us... I think my childhood was ****ed up, having just thought about it.
I was just about to mention Yar's Revenge. That was probably my favorite game on the Atari 2600 along with Asteroids. Great... now I decided to find sites with Atari 2600 games and have been playing Yar's Revenge for the past 10 minutes.
Holy crap, I was trying to figure out what this Berserk was that you guys kept mentioning. I used to play that all the time, too. Completely forgot about it. It's on that site I posted above.
Odd thing: Angry Video Game Nerd (who is the best Movie Reviewer since Siskel & Ebert & I wish he'd go that route) came up with the idea that Top Gun's Mighty Wings was Guile's background music in Street Fighter. I tend to agree. He came up with this video.
Documentary series on Netflix called High Score is all about early gaming history. The first episode talks about the ET game. Highly recommend for gaming lovers.
