By Kim J. Harmon

T

he week after Christmas was the always the best week when I was a kid because it was the week where we spent endless hours playing with (and often breaking and then getting tired of) the toys we got for Christmas.

Oh, I got some great stuff, too, and it’s sort of weird, now, to look back and remember what was the “in” technological gadget of the time and seeing – with aging eyes jaded by the new millennium – how incredibly backward that stuff would be now.

Like Pong, the old Atari game – the first video game. I was in fifth grade when my mom bought that and I still remember peaking into her closet, seeing it in that big shopping back stuck way back in the corner. Back then, 28 or so years ago, Pong was the height of technology and it cost something like $50 – a lot of money for a toy back in 1972.

Blip . . . blip . . . blip – jeez, we were positively entranced by a stupid game that was really nothing more than two white bars that moved up and down and one square ball of light that moved from side to side. The easy level was when the white bars were long and the hard level was when the white bars were short.

Then there was electric football – you know, the game where you set up your tiny, plastic football players on this somewhat realistic-looking field and then turn on the juice and watch them all flop around like they have epilepsy or something.

The original electric football game, though, was big, bulky and allowed the two human players to specifically operate two players on the field – one from each team (these players were much larger than the rest of the players). The two humans controlled the players by grabbing metal bars that slid under the football field. On the ends of these bars were magnets that attracted the one player with a magnet under its base.

Sounds fine, but my brother and I quickly discovered (like, on the first play) that the two metal bars would always jam against each other and when they were jamming against each other our two football players were always flying off the field.

The better electric football game didn’t have that problem – no bars, no magnets, just 22 players with epilepsy. I must admit, though, I really liked that game and had endless hours of fun trying to set up one play – trying to get one side of the offensive line to block to the left and the other side of the line to block to the right and getting my running back to run up through the huge hole in the middle.

It never worked.

We got a small, electric race track one year, too, and the one thing I’ll remember is that my brothers and I were never interested in seeing who could win some stupid race. We were always trying to get our cars to go as fast as possible so that they would flip off the track around one of the corners and maybe burst into flames or something (they never did).

The best sports game I ever got, though, had nothing technological about it. It was just a wooden pole with a chain and a wooden ball hanging from it – Skittle Bowl. You set up the pins, grab the ball and swing it out in such a way that it will come swinging back around the other side of the pole to knock all of the pins down. We played this game incessantly and darn near drove my father into an early grave.

It was great.

Then came the handheld video games – the forerunners to the Gameboy. Nothing more than a bunch of blipping lights, but we went nuts for them. I remember one game, a football game, that had one player (one blinking light) on offense and like 50 on defense and you had to somehow go up and down and forward and backward and whatnot trying to reach the end zone. It got to the point, after playing it so much, that I was able to play it with my eyes closed because the pattern had been nearly tattooed on the inside of my eyelids – much like the way you can see the ghost of an image on an old computer screen.

Gosh, then came Sega Genesis and by that time I was an adult (or so I believed). It was the first toy my wife bought me and looking back she probably regrets it. For me, it was a new era in sports entertainment and – looking back – I can’t believe how inane those games were.

In the sports games, there was always one or two plays, if you could find them, that were simply unstoppable by the CPU or AI or whatever you want to call it. In Madden ’94, it was a simple sweep play to the right or a tight-end post. In NHL ’94, it was the drive down the right wing, the deke to the left, and the flip shot to the right post.

It got to the point in Madden ’94, that I could run one play the entire game and never lose. It got to the point in NHL ’94 that my teams were winning 15-1 or 14-2 or something like that.

But I still kept playing . . . and playing and playing and playing.

Then came the revolutionary (at least at the time) Playstation – where I’m stuck now, trying to decide if I should buy the last remaining Playstation 2 left on the planet (if I could even find it) or just stick with my old 32-bit games like NFL Gameday 2001 and NFL Blitz 2000.

But it’s comforting to know that I’ve come from full circle – from one video game (Pong) to another (Playstation) – and that I’m still wasting unbelievable amounts of time that I could otherwise be spending doing something productive.

What that would be, though, I wouldn’t know.