Sometime in 1982, I pushed open the front door of our house and walked inside, dropping my bookbag on the floor in the process. I was happy to be home after a long day of school, and I was ready to relax for a bit before I tackled my homework. As the door shut behind me, my mind registered new sounds emanating from the living room, sounds I'd never heard before. Puzzled, I entered the living room. What I saw on the television made me stop short.
There, on the screen, was a life-like little man, wearing a green shirt and dark green pants. He was running through a jungle, jumping over snakes and fires, swinging over crocodile-laden lakes on vines, and collecting all sorts of treasures. Mom and Dad were sitting on the couch, laughing and having a great time as this intrepid adventurer continued on his quest. I smiled as I realized what was in store for me. They had bought a new game for our Atari 2600, and from the look of things, it was a good one. It was definitely like nothing I'd ever seen before. This was quite a change from the single screen space shooters and sports games that I was used to. Even the name was different and intriguing: Pitfall! (subtitled Pitfall Harry's Jungle
Adventure on the cartridge). I couldn't wait to try it out.
During the early '80s, this kind of thing would happen quite a bit. I may have been part of your average, middle-class family, but as Dad worked two jobshe spent his days tending plants at Verkade's Nursery in Canterbury, Connecticut, and his nights working on submarines at Electric Boat (a division of General Dynamics) across the Thames River in Grotonwe had spare cash to spend on new software for our 2600 more often than not. It was a great time to be a videogame-loving kid.
My life at the time could best be described as "average." I grew up in the small city of Oakdale, which is part of the town of Montville, on a little piece of land right off of Lynch Hill Road. I attended Palmer Memorial Elementary School at the time, which was one of the smallest elementary schools in the area. While Dad worked, Mom took the role of a stay-at-home mother. With three kids, she certainly had her hands full. She had four, actuallybut she didn't have four to take care of, as my older brother Richard (much older than me, by sixteen years) had struck out on his own when I was three. Because of that, I didn't know him all that well. My sister Sharon and my little brother Ryan were the siblings I knew the most, as we were all fairly close in age.
My interests were the same as nearly every other kid that grew up at the time. It was the era of the original Star Wars trilogy, the first two Indiana Jones movies, and all of the cartoons that came to define children's programming of the era: The Transformers, G.I. Joe, Thundercats, M.A.S.K., and Voltron, to name a fewnot to mention all of the assorted toys, books, trading cards and more that went with them. Of course, there were also videogames.
At the time, you simply couldn't get away from them. What started with a simple arcade machine known as Pong in 1972 had erupted into a multimillion dollar industry by the end of the 1970s, thanks to such arcade giants as Taito's Space Invaders and Atari's Asteroids, and the arrival of the home videogame console, the biggest of which was the Atari 2600. By the time the 1980s were in full swing, videogames were everywhere: on television, t-shirts, mugs, trading cards & stickers, board games, in candy form, and even in your local supermarket, where you could buy both Pac-Man and Donkey Kong cereal and Pac-Man ravioli all in the same trip.
