memories brought back by playing the demo games in the new microsoft gameroom

so we downloaded the new microsoft gameroom for our xbox the other day. we didn't play for very long cause, well, first off, they're demo games, and second, once you're used to halo 3 or whatever, asteroids doesn't really hold your attention. but they had a couple of old atari games on there that made me really excited. when we were kids, my mom found us an old atari 2600 and a bunch of games at a yard sale, and that, along with test drive and gauntlet on my apple iie, made up my early gaming history (until that fateful christmas of 1989, when we got our nes, and our lives were changed forever).



i wanted to shoot that dog so badly 
but really, it was that yard sale that defined my childhood: it was also where i bought a nearly-full set of old school nancy drews. somewhere out there on st. margaret's bay road, there's a thirty-something who's kicking themselves for getting rid of a potential gold mine.

1. we played battlezone a lot. i mean, a lot. i can even remember my dad playing it some nights at the cottage after a few glasses of wine, which is weird enough in itself. but the weirdest thing is, i totally remember battlezone as being in colour. not just in colour, but with elaborate, detailed graphics. but, you guys, battlezone really looks like this:
   
   
   yeah
   i was so confused by this that i was sure i had mixed it up with a different game. but everything else is the same, right down to the contours of the background. clearly my little mind had filled everything in all on its own. next thing you're going to tell me is that national velvet was in black and white, too...
2. she would never admit this to anyone, but my mother is quite the gamer. when i moved back home briefly in my last year of university, our mother-daughter bonding time consisted of beating donkey kong country one and two--and when i moved out, taking my super nintendo with me, i came home for dinner one day to find that she had bought one for herself. but my mother's love of gaming was actually born on a beautiful summer night by the bay, when i first introduced her to a game called word zapper. word zapper is a game where you're given a word and you have to shoot down letters from the top of the screen to spell it. my mom would play it for hours, the same way she would later play wordtris. yup, words and shooting things: a combination made in jones girl heaven.
3. in 1986, my sister and i spent hours upon hours shooting each other in combat. in 2010, cory and i spent about 30 seconds shooting each other in combat. granted, the real game has 27 different versions of shooting each other, whereas the demo only had one. but still. that's a lot of shooting each other. although who knows, if we hadn't done all that shooting in a video game, we might have tried pellet guns instead. or bows and arrows. we had a lot of issues to work out.
4. remember how i told you way back when about how i owned et as a kid but never watched it? well, the same thing went for et, the video game. and then cory told me about how et for atari basically bottomed out the whole industry, and there are literally entire landfills full of et atari games still in their package. so on one hand, i'm kind of sad i never played it, but at least i did my part to aid the struggling industry by actually owning a copy.
5. i don't know if this totally counts as an atari memory, but i also spent a lot of time at my friend meghan's playing return of the jedi on her atari st... so much time that i can still remember the little sound effects the death star made when you blew it up. i was worried that i totally just made this whole game up, until he who can find all things on the internet saved me from certain insanity.
   
   
   look how happy the ewoks are!
   later, on that very same computer, her brother showed us this thing you could do where you plugged the computer into your telephone cord and you could type messages to other people. he called it the "internet." crazy.