For the first time in decades I have been playing a video game.
Growing up, we had a state of the art video game console in the house, an Atari 2600. This machine was impressive… For the late 1970’s. Specifications included color graphics, 160×192 pixel resolution, and monaural sound. My brother and I played for hours, eventually beating some of the joysticks to the point where they required replacement. I mastered Space Invaders, I could play through all of the levels, wrapping back to level 1 for as long as my stamina allowed.
One of the games bundled with the Atari was Combat, there were four games on the cartridge including a tank game. I look back on that first game, one of the first we played on that console, with a bit of nostalgia. Two tanks maneuvered around a simple obstacle course, with a point awarded for each shot that hit the opponent. The audio was similarly quite simple, a basic growling sound meant to sound like engines and a few sound effects for the shots.
In the intervening decades I have seldom played video games with any great intensity. There was an Apple II space adventure game called Elite that I did play for a while in the 1980’s, but little else.