I might be a bit older than a lot of the people that talk about this sort of stuff but one of the things that I appreciate about my personal gaming history is that I was there when it all began. I was there when we had a handheld game that only had a few blinking lights on it that were solely red and you had to maneuver down the "field" score a touchdown.
You never played defense, you just ran up the score as much as you could. It would only beep in one sound that I recall, and there would be a longer beep if you got tackled. Mostly you would just lure the defense up to the top of the screen and then run to the other side and go all the way to the end. Then you would re-appear on the other side of the screen and do it over and over again.
Does that sound boring? Well it certainly would be by today's standards but we didn't have anything else to compare it to and these things were all over the place. You can buy them today but if you want an original one in the packaging be prepared to throw around hundreds of dollars.
Then we had another kind of handheld game that had no electronics in it at all! Perhaps you have seen these at some point in your life
That single button was actually a small air pump that would push the plastic rings to fly through the water and perhaps land on the pegs to catch them. It was a true exercise in frustration. These things were basically indestructible plastic gizmos and the only way you could really destroy them was to fill them up with something other than distilled water, which of course everyone did at some point or another. It might seem like a good idea to fill it up with Sprite to add another element of fun to the game, but it isn't a good idea and you can only do that once because afterwards all the rings will be permanently stuck to one another.
Another bad idea is to pour a packet of those little dehydrated shrimps called "Sea Monkeys" into the tank. Not only is the game not going to work anymore but you are also going to be committing mass genocide of all the dehydrated shrimps. It was entertaining once, then it was just kind of sad.
Then there was the best one of them all.
It was called "Labyrinth" by brand name but a lot of generic versions of it called something like "wooden maze game" were introduced to the market as well and I have no idea how they avoided lawsuits since it was exactly the same thing.
You controlled the platform with two knobs on the sides which would tilt the board in a certain direction so that you could attempt to guide a marble all the way to the end. It was a lot more difficult than it looks because towards the end there weren't many safe corners to rush the ball too. I played this game so much that I actually figured out shortcuts to jump walls to skip 3/4 of the board. Rough-housing the cheap wooden box like this resulted in stretching out the mechanism inside the box and rendering it unplayable... but it was fun while it lasted.
This was all before video games took over the world and I recall how interesting it was to travel to the toy store and see an entire aisle dedicated to table-top or board games. I wonder if this is even a thing anymore outside of collectors. I don't think that kids really play board games anymore but what do I know, I haven't been a kid for many many years.
Did you have any basic games that you played before we all got our hands on controllers and increasingly powerful video game consoles? When I think back to how basic our entertainment was back in those days I believe it would have absolutely blown our minds if we had just a peek at what entertainment was going to be like 30 years later.
