First things first...
Don't call me a Generation X-er
I am a child of the eighties. That is what I prefer to be called. The nineties can do
without me. Grunge isn't here to stay, fashion is fickle and "Generation X" is a myth
created by some over-40 writer trying to figure out why people wear flannel in the summer.
When I got home from school, I played with my Atari 2600. I spent hours playing Pitfall or
Combat or Breakout or Dodge'em Cars or Frogger. I never did beat Asteroids. Then I watched
"Scooby Doo." Daphne was a Goddess, and I thought Shaggy was smoking something synthetic in
the back of their psychedelic van. I hated Scrappy.
I would sleep over at friends' houses on the weekends. We played army with G.I. Joe figures, and I set up galactic wars between Autobots and Decepticons. We stayed up half the night throwing marshmallows and Velveeta at one another. We never beat the Rubik's Cube. I got up on Saturday mornings at 6 a.m. to watch bad Hanna-Barbera cartoons like "The Snorks," "Jabberjaw," "Captain Caveman," and "SpaceGhost." In between I would watch "School House Rock." ("Conjunction junction, what's your function?")
On weeknights Daisy Duke was my future wife. I was going to own the General Lee and shoot dynamite arrows out the back. Why did they weld the doors shut? At the movies the Nerds got Revenge on the Alpha Betas by teaming up with the Omega Mus. I watched Indiana Jones save the Ark of the Covenant, and wondered what Yoda meant when he said, "No, there is another." Ronald Reagan was cool. Gorbachev was the guy who built a McDonalds in Moscow. My family took summer vacations to the Gulf of Mexico and collected "Muppet Movie" glasses along the way. (We had the whole set.) My siblings and I fought in the back seat. At the hotel we found creative uses for Connect Four pieces like throwing them in that big air conditioning unit.
I listened to John Cougar Mellencamp sing about Little Pink Houses for Jack and Diane. I was bewildered by Boy George and the colors of his dreams, red, gold, and green. MTV played videos. Nickelodeon played "You Can't Do That on Television" and "Dangermouse." Cor! HBO showed Mike Tyson pummel everybody except Robin Givens, the bad actress from "Head of the Class" who took all Mike's cashflow.
I drank Dr. Pepper. "I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?" Shasta was for losers. TAB was a laboratory accident. Capri Sun was a social statement. Orange juice wasn't just for breakfast anymore, and bacon had to move over for something meatier. And no one had any idea where the beef was at.
My mom put a thousand Little Debbie Snack Cakes in my Charlie Brown lunch box, and filled my Snoopy Thermos with grape Kool-Aid. Iwould never eat the snack cakes, though. Did anyone? I got two thousand cheese and cracker snack packs, and I ate those.
I went to school and had recess. I went to the same classes everyday. Some weird guy from the eighth grade always won the sciencefair with the working hydro-electric plant that leaked on my project about music and plants. They just loved Beethoven. Field day was bigger than Christmas, but it always managed to rain just enough to make everybody miserable before they fell over in the three-legged race. Where did all those panty hose come from? "Deck the Halls with Gasoline, fa la la la la la la la la," was just a song.
Burping was cool. Rubber band fights were cooler. A substitute teacher was a baby sitter/marked woman. Nobody deserved that. I went to Cub Scouts. I got my arrow-of-light, but never managed to win the Pinewood Derby. I got almost every skill award but don't remember ever doing anything.
The world stopped when the Challenger exploded.
Half of your friends' parents got divorced.
People did not just say no to drugs.
AIDS started, but you knew more people who had a grandparent die from cancer.
Somebody in your school died before they graduated.
When you put all this stuff together, you have my childhood. If this stuff sounds familiar, then I bet you are one, too.
We are children of the eighties. That is what I prefer "they" call it.
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first "lost generation" nor today's lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak. We are theones who played with Lego Building Blocks when they were just building blocks and gave Malibu Barbie crewcuts with safety scissors that never really cut.
We collected Garbage Pail Kids and Cabbage Patch Kids and My Little Ponies and Hot Wheels and He-Man action figures and thought She-Ra looked just a little bit like I would when I was a woman.
Big Wheels and bicycles with streamers were the way to go, and sidewalk chalk was all you needed to build a city. Imagination was the key. It made the Ewok Treehouse big enough for you to be Luke and the kitchen table and an old sheet dark enough to be a tent in the forest. Your world was the backyard and it was all you needed. With your pink portable tape player, Debbie Gibson sang back up to you and everyone wanted a skirt like the Material Girl and a glove like Michael Jackson's.
Today, we are the ones who sing along with Bruce Springsteen andThe Bangles perfectly and have no idea why. We recite lines with the Ghostbusters and still look to The Goonies for a great adventure. We flip through T.V. stations and stop at The A Team and Knight Rider and Fame and laugh with The Cosby Show and Family Ties and Punky Brewster and what you talkin' 'bout Willis?
We hold strong affections for The Muppets and The Gummy Bears and why did they take the Smurfs off the air? After school specials were only about cigarettes and step-families. The Pokka Dot Door was nothing like Barney, and aren't the Power Rangers just Voltron reincarnated?
We are the ones who still read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Beverly Clearly and Judy Blume, Richard Scary and the Electric Company. Friendship bracelets were ties you couldn't break and friendship pins went on shoes - preferably hightop Velcro Reebox - and pegged jeans were in, as were Units belts and layered socks and jean jackets and jams and charm necklaces and side pony tails and just tails. Rave was a girl's best friend; braces with colored rubberbands made you cool.
The backdoor was always open and Mom served only red Kool-Aid to the neighborhood kids- never drank New Coke. Entertainment was cheap and lasted for hours. All you needed to be a princess was high heels and an apron; the Sit'n'Spin always made you dizzy but never made you stop; Pogoballs were dangerous weapons and Chinese Jump Ropes never failed to trip someone. In your Underoos you were Wonder Woman or Spider Man or R2D2 and in your treehouse you were king.
In the Eighties, nothing was wrong. Did you know the president was shot? Star Wars was not only a movie. Did you ever play in a bomb shelter? Did you see the Challenger explode or feed the homeless man? We forgot Vietnam and watched Tiananman's Square on CNN and bought pieces of the Berlin Wall at the store. AIDS was not the number one killer in the United States.
We didn't start the fire, Billy Joel. In the Eighties, we redefined the American Dream, and those years defined us. We are the generation in between strife and facing strife and not turning our backs. The Eighties may have made us idealistic, but it's that idealism that will push us and be passed on to our children - the first children of the twenty-first century. Never forget: We are the children of the Eighties.
If this is familiar, you are one of us...
I
hate confessionals, so let's get the confessional part out of the way: whenever I go home for a visit, the first thing I do is not to call my friends or spend time with my parents I head straight for the local video game arcade. As with most addictions, this is not because my love for parents and friends has vanished, but because the arcade speaks to me and I must heed that call.
And as with any long-term addiction (you can trace this one back to my experiencing Pong for the first time at maybe age five) it's gotten stale. The new video games have gotten smoother, flashier, faster, and more realistic it's undeniable. But somewhere along the way something got lost, and here it is tempting to wax poetic (which should set off all sorts of warning bells) and yet it's true: Video games just ain't what they used to be.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks so: just take a look at the scads of video game emulators running around the Web. Defender, Zaxxon, Dig-Dug; pick your sprite-based poison, it's yours. It's free, too, as long as you own a copy of the original but emulators are the Traci Lords of downloadable vids, and nobody's checking. The vintage gaming fad is seeping into the video game parlor, too; old Galaga and Battlezone rigs haunt the back rooms, oldsters huddled at the one-joystick, one-button controls.
So is it really true are the new video games truly inferior, or is this just some nostalgia kick for twenty- and thirty-somethings who are starting to feel old? The answer is, well, both.
When I was a kid, you were either an Atari guy or a ColecoVision guy, and that was pretty much it as far as video games went. Well, unless you were an Intellivision guy. But Intellivision guys didn't really count, because nothing good ever came of Intellivision. Okay, so forget Intellivision guys.
Anyway, I was an Atari guy.
Well, all right, not always. I started out a Coleco guy by necessity, because that's the system my best friend Jeremy had. Still, a few hundred hours of Atari Space Invaders was all it took to convince me that there had to be a better way. The joysticks were always busted, the graphics were pretty base... Basically, it sucked.
So once my parents broke down and bought my sister and me an Atari, they couldn't get us off the damned thing. It wasn't a waste, though playing those games taught me a lot, most notably how to lie gracefully ("Mom! I'm almost done with this game! I'll turn it off in a second, I swear!").
Coleco was different, though. Coleco had the graphics, it had a lot more games worth playing, and even though the original Coleco controls sucked eggs, they came out with those grip handle thingies with the rainbow-colored buttons that let you move the joystick without taking your fingers off the action buttons, and let me tell you, those things were bitchin', to use a phrase popular with us kids at the time. But it still wasn't the greatest thing since sliced bread.
But then in 1986 I discovered something called the Commodore 64. You could write your own games using a language called basic and if you were really a brainiac you could even use something called machine language. I never got the hang of it, but I did come up with some pretty cool games using basic. And I also had all the great arcade games like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac Man and Dig-Dug and Frogger and Space Invaders Pole Position and the now infamous Q-bert.
Nowadays, kids have a hell of a lot more options. There's no more simple Coleco vs. Atari, Good vs. Evil dichotomy now it's a Super Nintendo/Nintendo 64/Sega G enesis/Sony Playstation/SuperMegaMondoDrive milieu. Kind of makes me long for even a good old Atari (though not an Intellivision). So it was cool to find some people on the Web who remember the old days, when times (and video game choices) were simpler. You know, the '80s.
Here's my theory, half-baked maybe, but with some good ingredients: my generation, that generation without a label,the children of the 80s, isn't truly happy with having no unifying identity, no rallying call. And so we appropriate old fads and styles with aplomb and a certain amazing rapidity. Wasn't it only eight years ago, maybe less, that the '60s were in and hip to copy? Well, we moved on to the '70s pretty quickly, reabsorbing disco and funk and swinging cocktail times and while some of that interest is still with us, you can see a fascination with the early '80s beginning already. Breakdancing is coming back, along with old-school rap, and of course, my favorite, metal (atcually, I don't think it ever left, it just went into hibernation for a while); in this time of retro consumption, even aberrations like a Tiffany comeback album (this is real, or so I hear through the grapevine) seem normal or possibly inevitable. And with this in mind it's no wonder that we should find old-school video gaming reappearing too.
In the '80s, video games formed the basis for a classic subculture. Vids formed the fantasy world for the bright geek, who was perhaps the preeminent character archetype and consumer of that time; witness WarGames, The Last Starfighter, and of course Tron, visions from '80s movie execs who caught the zeitgeist. Most video games were underdog good vs. evil battles, with never-ending waves of enemies coming at you, the single lonely ship/tank/human left to fight off this onslaught - the challenge in most of these classics comes from the fact that they don't end. Armageddon games ran rampant, and I don't think it is too much to read both a Cold War mentality into the games and an invitation to that geeky gamer to participate in a world he (or she for that matter) appreciated all too well one vs. many, except this time with a chance to fight back, if only a doomed one. Perhaps all the better for being doomed. We have to appreciate too that this is a time when computers were still sort of spooky, and those phosphorescent screens disconcerting prehistoric beasts in this pre-Macintosh, pre-Web time. Interacting with these video games was participation in something arcane. And all of this made the whole experience vaguely subversive.
Video games got mainstreamed over time perhaps the development of competitive home video game platforms was responsible, taking kids out of the always seamy, wild arcades and transforming vids into the stuff of slumber parties. The Berlin Wall came down, we all started using e-mail, computers became a lifestyle. Video games, now part of the home, are no longer either cool or uncool, just everyday. It is no wonder that we miss them so.
The other half of the theory comes from the games themselves, and the ways in which they have changed. Today, it's obvious that a lot of stock is being placed in producing games with the slickest new graphics, the most excellent sound, etc. The first thing you do when you see a new game these days is to ooh and aah over the smoothness of the motion, the clever 3D panning, blah blah blah. Then you settle down and play the game, and probably figure out pretty quickly that it's basically the same as X other game, with this and that new feature thrown in, but basically an updated clone. That's no good because people don't just buy games for breathtaking visuals or mindblowing sound, they get games to play games. Nevertheless, if you pick up any game in the store, or try any at the arcade, you'll almost certainly have this experience. This is because nobody is coming up with original games anymore. Well, almost nobody there are a few notable exceptions, like the genre-busting Parappa the Rappa, but the broad-strokes conclusion must be that the video game makers have run out of ideas.
Consider: The current audience is the first to have grown up with MTV, and while it's clichι to say so, that means a shorter attention span and an expectation of constant progress of production values. They own computers capable of running TV-level video and sound. They have Internet access, meaning a huge array of gaming options, and huge competition between those games; and they have now have adult incomes to dispose of. All of that has driven the gaming industry to transform from a group of artisans cultivating a craft into yet another strain of standard Japanamerican corporate capitalism. To win that audience, you need to be operating on the level of a movie studio (indeed, you may have your own movie set), which means that there are a relatively small number of gaming companies responsible for most of the games out there. This is a trend that will only increase with time; companies will merge and buy each other out, until we have an oligopoly of gaming companies, just like the oligopoly of airlines and with just as many bright ideas.
It also means (and this is where we come back to the causes of Nostalgia don't you just love it when everything finally dovetails?) that both the players and the makers have something very different on their minds than did their counterparts fifteen years ago. Players are not really identifying themselves in the game that they are playing; they punch in codes from their code sheets to make the characters do cool things, and that's the basic thrill, watching the carnage as a movie might be watched. The video game becomes a plaything, an experiment, not an adversary or a world, except in rare cases like the record-breaking Myst and its sequel Riven. Involvement usually occurs only when there is the chance to compete against friends. And they don't identify themselves because the games themselves are faceless, craftless reproductions of one another which occurs because they get produced by huge corporations for a pretty bland consumer base.
In the end, that kind of gaming experience leaves you feeling kind of empty after a while. And so we turn back the clock, and dig out the old games, whether as downloads from the Web or in the back of arcades, or even setting up old Atari 2600 systems on our stereo TVs. We do it because we are nostalgic fools who have still clued into something: the games really were better back then.
So here's what I did, I went out and found an emulator for the Commodore 64 that would work on my PC. (Sorry Macintosh users!) And then I built a cable to hook up my old 1541 disk drive through the parallel port on the PC. Then I was able to save all of my old games on to my hard drive. So what you ask? Well, because I'm such a nice guy, I'm going to let you join in the fun. I've zipped up the games and the emulator below and you can download it, and then play the games just like me without the need of any extra hardware or adapters. I should mention that because of the way software licenses work, you should have a copy of the game titles to use them, but I don't think too many of us still have that stuff anymore, so maybe you could just send some money to Coleco or Nintendo or Activision, that is, if you can find them. Oh forget it, nobody is gonna care! So download this zip file and join me and many other children of the 80s in experiencing a little nostalgia. Just don't blame me when you get addicted to it all over again!