One special Christmas to remember

December 19, 2007 10:37 am

— It’s that time of year again, time for old Saint Nick to visit all the good boys and girls. It’s a time I remember well from my childhood.
If memory serves me correctly, it was the Christmas of 1984 and I, being a 12-year-old boy, wanted nothing more than an Atari game system for Christmas that year.
It wasn’t long into the school year when one of my classmates had gotten an Atari and he was the talk of the school, the first one in the class to have such a game system. Because up until that time, video games were limited to arcade games, which we didn’t have much of in Philadelphia. The closest thing we had to an arcade in Philadelphia was a couple of machines at the newly opened Wal-Mart, which my mother visited every week. On a side note, I remember coming home and telling my dad that he should invest some money in this Wal-Mart place because there sure seemed to be a lot of people spending their money there.
Anyway, every Friday afternoon while my mother was shopping for groceries at Vowells and for household items at Wal-Mart, I would spend my dollar in quarters on the video games. I looked forward to this trip every week.
Then after the game playing was done, my mother would run me through the drive-in at McDonald’s where I got treated to a six-piece McNuggets. For a 12-year-old boy, it doesn’t get any better than that.
From an early age, I had an interest in computers and video games. A year or so earlier, I had actually gotten a Commodore 64 computer, the first of the home computers, although it did very little.
I did learn how to write Basic on this machine, something that would prove useful later in life. The only way you could play a game on this system was through a cassette tape. Yes kids, that’s right, a cassette tape. The game was recorded on the cassette tape, and put into a machine that was plugged into the Commodore 64.
I remember that it didn’t work very well and wished that there was something better. Well, Atari found something better in its 2600.
By the time I expressed my wishes to my mother, I was perhaps a little late and the first of many holiday rushes ensued. My mother spent the better part of a month trying to find an Atari and I started to think I just wasn’t going to get one.
Then came Christmas morning and under the tree was the thing I had coveted for months, an Atari 2600 and a Pac-Man video game complete with two joysticks .
It wasn’t long before we had it plugged into the television and off I went, struggling through the mazes. I played all morning, without interruption.
Breakfast mattered not as I consumed dots and ran from ghosts. By lunch, my mother made me put the joystick down to come eat lunch. By that time, I had rubbed blister on my right thumb where I gripped the joystick so tightly.
I continued to play throughout the day and was a permanent member of the “Atari generation” as we have been called.
By the time I became a teen-ager, along came the Nintendo and we were all blown away by games like Super Mario Brothers and Mike Tyson’s Punchout.
Then came college, work, marriage and children. Before long, there was a thing called a Sony PlayStation that was far superior to anything we had seen. It didn’t take Bill Gates long to get into the act with his gaming system called the XBox.
Now, XBox is in its second generation and PlayStation in its third. Nintendo’s latest is called a Wii with wireless remotes and less serious games for the young and young at heart.
While I still enjoy a good video game every now and then, there will never be another Atari or another Christmas like that. Now, I get to enjoy the magic of Christmas through my children’s eyes. I’m happy to get a new pair of pants, a hug from my wife and smiles from my children.
While we work hard to remind the kids of the true meaning of Christmas – that it’s not about gifts but celebrating the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ – we do hope they have special Christmas memories.
God bless and merry Christmas to all.
Robbie Robertson is editor and publisher of The Star Herald.