Memoirs of a Retrogamer: Attract Mode
5Introducing a series where I revisit the games that meant a lot to me in my youth, and how they stand up in the 2020s. Subscribe to Blown Cartridges for more retro game videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoDQj54Gd-w8RTdukMrQScQ?sub_confirmation=1
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I started gaming young. Very young. Maybe gaming isn't quite the right word for it, but when I was a little kid - six, seven years old - in the mid-80s, arcade games were everywhere. Laundromats. Furniture stores. Gas stations. Anywhere people had to sit around and wait, the owner might buy a cabinet, or an enterprising operator might lease the space to put a cabinet.
My mom, a single mother raising me with the help of my grandparents, would often take me out on errands and such, and as soon as I was tall enough to reach the joysticks I'd be entranced by the flashing lights and bleeps and bloops of the games' attract mode. I'd "play" by tapping buttons and wiggling the joystick - Mom was broke so she didn't have the change to spare to entertain a little kid, but by the time I was old enough to really care about the distinction, she'd married my step-dad. Not that we had much more money, but by then the crash had hit so arcade games in the wild were scarce anyway.
I’m a big fan of retrogaming, and it only makes sense - many of these games were contemporaneous to me. I played them when they were new, and that of course colors my perception of them - both when I think back to remember what they were like to play back in the day, and upon revisiting them. Sometimes I’m disappointed. Sometimes I’m enlightened.
This series - Memoirs of a Retrogamer - is an attempt to give you insight into the building blocks of my attitudes towards games and gaming. It’s intensely personal by nature. I’ll be revisiting the games that had an impact on me throughout my life, reminiscing on what they meant then, and what it’s like to play them in the 2020s.
Some posts will cover specific games in details, others might cover entire series, and some will be reflections on the consoles as a whole - depending on how much I have to say on a topic. I’ll be going as chronologically as I can, given my faulty memory and the way my ownership of different console overlap.
A very rough roadmap of the direction I plan to take this:
* The Atari 2600. My first console, a hand-me-down from my uncle.
**** Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGctmF6QmQU
* The ColecoVision. A Christmas gift.
* My first exposure to computers via the TRS-80 and Apple II
* The Nintendo Entertainment system, a 1988 Christmas gift… I think.
* Commodore 64, acquired in… I want to say… 1990?
* Early PC gaming with the family’s 486.
* The Sega Genesis. I’ll also set this around ‘92.
* Arcade Rat. It was in the early 90s.
* The SNES zone.
* My own PC. Call it 1996.
* Also picked up a PS1 in 1996.
* A few years later I bought an N64. A lot of great couch co-op games.
* And then the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast both at around the same time.
* Finally, the PS2 era.
That’s not the end, of course, but around 2000 or so I’d entered the ‘feckless vagabond’ phase of my life, spending about a decade wandering the country, living out of a suitcase, and working a series of low-paying temp jobs that ultimately culminated in couch-surfing homelessness. I had a laptop, sure, but wasn’t doing a lot of gaming.
I might transition into a series on the games I missed out on. We’ll see.
Anticipate one entry in this series every week, alongside the usual Blown Cartridges video game history and review content. I’ll be uploading them ahead of time to the channel patreon, so feel free to sign up if you don’t feel like waiting.
http://www.patreon.com/blowncartridges