by Wade Manns
My first game console was the Atari 2600. It was around 1983 or 1984, when I was around four or five years old. My brother (who is about three years older than me) and I would gather around that storied box of wonders that connected to our television set and play several highly pixellated offerings, among them a translation of the arcade game, Pac-Man. I thought it was the best thing ever. As I had not played the original arcade version at the time, little did I realize that the translation (in terms of graphics and gameplay) was so poor that much of the game’s value had been drained away in the process.
Over the years, my fascination for videogames never quite abated, though I found out later of the events surrounding the “Great Video Game Crash” of 1983 and 1984: in short, many low-quality consoles and several titles such as my beloved 2600 Pac-Man, and the game based on the movie E.T., also for 2600, were mass produced in many more quantities than were sold (the reason being that they were quite inferior products), resulting in the big video game companies losing much money. Similar to issues today, the video game industry needed a bailout in the worst way.
It came in 1985, with the advent of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This new game console, by a company that made playing cards in the 60s and earlier, awakened my senses and my imagination to new possibilities in gaming, and introduced me to a character who even today is one of my favorites: Mario. Besides Pac-Man of years before, this seemed to be the video game industry’s first exposure to mascots, who advertise products and enhance brand recognition.
In 1991, the company known as Sega released its Genesis console, rumored to be faster than the newly released Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Sega seemed to build up the reputation of the accelerated speed of the Genesis; of course, we know of the power of the hype machine in all walks of life; while the CPU (central processing unit, which is the brain of any computer) speed of the Genesis was indeed faster than that of the SNES, it wasn’t mind-blowingly faster, and the quality of the games on the Genesis compared roughly with those on the SNES.
Today, I can revisit those times with the use of emulators. These are programs that can emulate (or reproduce) the functioning of older systems, such as the Atari 2600 or the NES, the Super NES, Genesis, and others, as well as the classic arcade cabinets, with varying degrees of authenticity. It’s extremely cool to play those exciting titles of yesteryear, and while there may be newer and better-looking games out nowadays, I’ll always have a place in my heart for the nostalgia brought on by playing these older games; even if their graphics may not be up to par with the standards of today, the gameplay is still there.