My name is Kevin James Breaux and I was born Jan 25th 1974… and by 1981 my father had bought me my first video game system, the Atari 2600.
Man, that thing was glorious. The games were so much fun and I can’t recall many that I played that I did not enjoy. In fact, some of them I still enjoy to this day. You have to give a game credit when you can pick it up, turn it on and start playing it in a matter of seconds: no save data to manage, no loading screen, no mulling over where you left off and what you still had to do. Just flip a switch and start having fun. Back then I was too young to know about “replayability”, I don’t even know if the word existed. BUT thinking back that was one of the strongest points of all Atari 2600 games, replay value. With no saves, you always started from the beginning, and always had fun.
 |
1983 - Matt Zelesko and I playing Atari 2600. I think the game is Indiana Jones.
|
I truly loved my Atari 2600. It was originally installed on this tiny TV with maybe a nine or ten inch screen, but it was color. It sat in the corner of the rec-room, next to my dad’s giant TV… and I vividly remember playing as much as my parents would allow me.
I kept my Atari installed for many years, all the way up and through the early Nintendo Entertainment System(NES) days. In fact, I would still own my original Atari 2600 if my dad did not lend it to the destructive kids of some family friend. Oh, that’s another day I will never forget… my dad shows up one afternoon with a new Atari 2600 he bought from Kiddie City or the likes. It was the newer “sleeker” design, not the old 70s wood grain version that was just too rad to even believe. So he handed me the new Atari 2600 and with it tells me my old one got broken. I might have been 12-13 at the time, but I was pretty darn upset.
Side note, four or five years ago I bought a replacement wood grain Atari 2600 off of eBay and packed it with my old games, which I still had a few of… I imagined one day I would reconnect it. This winter I nearly did. I actually unpacked it all and cleaned it off. It was right after my b-day.... You see, every year around my b-day I get extra retrospective. In fact, the past has been on my mind heavily for the last several months.
For about two months I left my Atari 2600 unpacked and ready to connect, sitting in my garage. I was really ready to hook it up... it was almost a FIELD OF DREAMS moment where my subconscious was saying, “If you plug in the Atari they will come.”
But who will come? Aliens? Not Aliens, I hope. The original Activision programmers? Now that would be totally cool. I would love to meet David Crane, he designed many of my favorite games, and yes, I would totally challenge that guy to a game of Decathlon.
 |
Still my favorite game
|
I recall many times that my friend, Matt and I, at the tender ages of 8-11, asked my dad to play Decathlon with us because our theory was only an adult could be strong enough to break the high scores… Growing up, my friends and I played that game all the way through high school and I did not reach the GOLD MEDAL score until college. (FYI – I took a picture of the score on the screen and mailed it to Activison.)
For years, and years, Mr. David Crane, my friends and I thought you must be some sort of super strong, genetically engineered, Übermensch, all because your high scores seemed unbeatable. If I do finally connect my Atari 2600 in my garage, and you do come over to play, we can test that theory once and for all.
Gold Medal Winner
http://www.kevinbreaux.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment