On Nostalgia
By Matthew Stephen Sunrich
I was in ninth grade, in 1989, when
I experienced nostalgia for the first time.
I had recently begun collecting
comics, and while flipping through an issue of The Incredible Hulk from early in the decade, which I had gotten
from a friend along with a stack of others, I ran across an advertisement for a
book of puzzles and games featuring characters from classic video games
(Pac-Man, Q*Bert, et al). You might recall how they merchandized the crap out
of these characters during the so-called Golden Age of Arcade Games. I remember
stuffed animals, PVC figurines, t-shirts, candy, and jewelry, amongst tons of
other junk.
I had, of course, been a video-game
enthusiast since 1980, when I played Pac-Man
in the local Kroger for the first time (I had no idea what I was doing, but I was
hooked). I spent a lot of time in arcades, which in those days were everywhere.
I grew up in a pretty small town, and we had at least five or six of them. I
didn't get an Atari 2600 until the price went down to twenty-five bucks
(despite numerous attempts, I could never get my dad to shell out the bread for
one before this development, even though he bought a Commodore Vic-20, which I
really only used as a video-game console), but my cousin had one, and we spent
an insane amount of time playing it. My uncle even subscribed to some sort of "cartridge
of the month" club that mailed new games to you every few weeks. We were,
perhaps not surprisingly, completely oblivious to the fact that the market
crashed in 1983; all we knew was that you could suddenly get Atari games for
pennies on the dollar.
Since then, I had graduated to the
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which I still consider the greatest
console ever made. Even though it had only been seven or eight years since the
Atari heyday, video games, both home and arcade versions, had changed immensely
in that time. Even though we played a lot of Atari, we often complained about
the poor quality of the graphics and gameplay. The home ports didn't come
anywhere close to stacking up to their arcade counterparts (the worst example
of this was, of course, the Atari port of Pac-Man,
which was infamously thrown together quickly so it could reach stores by the
Christmas season and was a major contributor to the aforementioned crash). We
always hoped for something better. When the NES hit, it felt like we had
entered a completely different world.
Labels: 1980s, arcade, Hulk, mario bros, nintendo, nostalgia, pac-man, video game
posted by Hasslein Books @ 4:57 AM
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