When It Comes To Gaming, I Am Old School

I know that gaming has become a huge industry, and people can actually have an occupation where they play video games for a living.  I have seen friends of mine with every gaming system under the sun.  A PlayStation, A Game Cube, Xbox, you name it.  I have memories when I was in college, and some of my dorm mates would spend hours in their dorm rooms playing whatever video game system they had.

Some of you may recognize the basic joystick in this article.  That is the only gaming controller I need. Because I still have one, and the paddles, and about 100 games.

As you can see I have quite a few games, and a few of them have never been out of their packaging.  I even thought about contacting the Pawn Stars pawn shop in Las Vegas to see if they have any value.  Who knows, maybe I will end up on the show someday.

If you had forgotten what the Atari 2600 console looks like, there is a picture above.  It was released in 1977.  In 1980 the Space Invaders game came out and by 1982 it was the biggest game console around.  I am proud to still have a working one, although it still works best on a television that is an old tube TV with just one output in the back. They stopped making them in 1992. The console, not the TV.

Like most of us, we all have Smart TV's and believe it or not, you can still play some old school games on them.  The video above will show you how to hook up your old Atari game system to your current TV.  I may do this soon, as I have done it in the past.

One of the games that came with Atari was Freeway.  This was a game where you had to move your Chicken across the road.  Simple game, but still kind of fun, and I love the old archaic graphics.  But this was big at the time.

Activision was a huge part of my youth, and a lot of their video games seemed to be very popular.  Pitfall was very popular, and was even turned into a cartoon.

River Raid is seen above.  Still one of my favorites.  I got pretty good at it.

There is an interesting story behind the video game E.T.  One of the worst video games ever created.  Click HERE for some info on the documentary about all the games that ended up in the landfill.

If you plan on being stuck inside this weekend, or want to reminisce about the days when video games where in this infancy, perhaps this will bring back some cool memories of your childhood.  I may try and hook mine up and see if I remember how to play any of these games.