Your gaming history

[mike_intellivision]

I got my first taste of video gaming on the quarter-eating sub target games found at pizza shops in the early 1970s.

I then remember being memorized by the quarter-eating pong clones, so much so that I convinced my parents to get me a Unisonic Tournament T-2000 dedicated unit for a combined birthday and Christmas gift in 1976 (a mid-December birthday makes this possible).

I played pong at my house and friends' houses -- as well as off-shoot games like Atari pinball -- into the early 1980s. I was also exposed to computers -- such as the Commodore PET, Apple II, TRS-80, and Altair through school and friends.

Some friends started getting Atari 2600s, but I held out. Eventually in the spring of 1982, I bought a Mattel Intellivision for a then-low price of only $235 at the US Coast Guard Reserve Training Center Exchange in Yorktown, VA. It came with Las Vegas Poker & Black Jack, I bought Major League Baseball with the system, and I received Astrosmash in a giveaway. I played that on the color TV in the living room and even once took it to a friend's house for a Friday evening game party -- which my parents did not want me to do (fearing I would damage the game).

In college, I got the computer add-on for the Intellivision, but it did not live up to its early promise. I then got a Coleco Adam and used it for papers and programming -- until it crashed at 2:30 a.m. while I was working on a paper (and back to Sears it went). I eventually got a C64 which provided gaming opportunities as well as serving as my computer through my first term of graduate school.

Meanwhile, I continued buying Intellivision games, from toy stores, Games & Gadgets (the predecessor to EB, where once they tried to talk me out of buying Turbo because it was so bad), from garage sales, from JCPenney closeout sales, from anywhere. My name somewhere got sent to INTV Inc., the company which bought the gaming system and marketed carts after Mattel gave up on the system.

Shortly after I got my Intellivision, my younger sister got an Atari 2600 (my mother was so upset that the sales person did not tell her about the 5200 that would shortly arrive). Thus, since I lived at home while at college, I had access to that as well.

When I moved away to graduate school at Virginia Tech in 1987, I only had the Intellivision and the C64. I picked up a PC (an Amstrad PC1512) that first Christmas season for school work and bought a few PC games. One of the other students had brought an Odyssey 2 system which he never played, let me borrow it over the summer one year, and never wanted it back. Similarly, I somewhat "adopted" my sister's Atari 2600 after she got a Genesis.

For the next few years, that was my gaming collection. I saw systems come and go. I was upset about the NES replacing the classics in the stores. I saw interesting things like the Atari Lynx. But I really wasn’t into the new stuff -- except for computer games (some of which I played, some of which I never did). I did acquire a non-working Emerson Arcadia 2001 in 1991. (The day after I finally ended an on-again, off-again 3-1/2 relationship with the second and final calling off an engagement, I went to a local second hand store and picked up an EA2001 with six games. The system didn't work and the person let me return everything but didn't want the non-functioning system back -- so I kept it. This would foreshadow later events.)

I did never lose my love for video games during this time. And when I made sojourns to used book stores for professional volumes, I always looked in the game sections. The result is a lot of hard-to-find volumes from the classic era by people like Jeff Rovin and Ken Uston are on my bookshelf. This would also foreshadow later events.

Finally, in 1993 or so, I saw an ad in the back of “Computer Shopper” where someone was advertising old video game carts. I made contact and immediately started to try to get information on two Intellivision games that had disappeared out of the stores before I had a chance to buy them – Tropical Trouble and White Water. I even managed to buy one of them too. I also then learned about two games that were only sold in Europe – Super Cobra and Tutankhamen. I made it my quest to get these games and a collector was born.

I started hitting thrift stores and flea markets. And while I didn’t find those rare Intellivision games (eventually finding them on-line through UseNet auctions), I did find other things. Slowly I bought other games and home computers from that classic era like a Mattel Aquarius computer or a Commodore Vic-20 or the Atari 8-bit. I also found strange systems like the RCA Studio II and not so strange like that Atari 5200 that my younger sister never had.

I continued my collecting ways when I took a job at West Virginia University in 1995. In that first year I found everything from a Channel F to a Colecovision. Meanwhile, on a trip to my older sister’s house for Thanksgiving in 1995, I found an Atari 7800 at an indoor flea market in Indianapolis while visiting friends and then I got to my sister’s house and asked my her about their old TI-99/4A computer, I got that as well as the SNES and Genesis they could not trade in because everyone – including them – had Playtations.

Eventually, I got a Playstation too. I bought an NES from a friend. I picked up a 3D0 and a Jaguar used at EB. I got the EA2001 fixed. And I acquired just everything else -- like the Virtual Boy I picked up at #RGVC-con in Dayton, Ohio in October 1996. I got into other systems as time went along and got them used, like the Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube.

I did do some bartering – my flipped a Microvision for an N64 and a Vectrex for a Dreamcast.

I loved to learn portables as well. I got a Game Gear. I found myself one of those Lynx. I even got a Gameboy.
Finally, in April 2007, I bought only the second new system of my life – that little white box of joy known as a Wii. Presently I have over 300 games for it.

My current (approximate inventory) is:
Atari 2600 (500 games)
Atari 5200 (55)
Atari 7800 (60)
Atari Lynx (36)
Atari Jaguar with CD (40, 4)
Atari 8-bit (120+)
Colecovision (100+)
Intellivision (130)
Mattel Aquarius (10)
Odyssey 2 (60)
EA2001 (23)
Bally Astrocade (20)
Fairchild Channel F (26) (sound needs repair)
APF MP 1000 (10?)
Commodore 64 (125+)
Commodore Vic-20 (20)
TI 99/4A (100+)
TRS-80 CoCo (40-50)
NES (400-420)
Super Nintendo (50)
Nintendo 64 (60)
Nintendo Gamecube (80)
Wii (300)
Gameboy – Pocket, Light, and Color (plus non-working original) (35)
Gameboy Advance – GBA, GBA SP and GBA SP 1000 (50)
DS (60 plus my son has 15)
3DS (7 – my son’s)
Sega Master System (100 +)
Sega Genesis with CD and 32X (100, 15, 10, 2)
Sega Saturn (almost 300 including imports)
Sega Dreamcast (140-150)
Sega Game Gear (100 +)
3D0 (80-100)
Playstation (50-75)
PS2 (40-50)
Xbox (75)
Various Pong Machines (including an Atari Pinball and two Unisonic T-2000s)
(Not fully functional original Magnovox Odyssey with six game cards)