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Like a lot of people my age, my first experiences with video games where mainly from arcades. I was so fascinated with them that my mom would let me stand outside one in the mini mall she did her grocery shopping at while she did that. In retrospect, letting a small, kindergarten aged child stand alone outside an arcade was probably ill-advised, but it was either that or she carts around a very irritable me while she shops for food. Let me tell you, thanks to that I pretty much have the demo for Teddy Boy Blues memorized.

But between this, the small arcade at the bowling alley we went to and the general pervasiveness of arcade machines, I was in electronic media heaven. However, my parents were not incredibly keen on getting a console. Not only because of the general worries about getting one, my brother and I spending our time playing games instead of schoolwork being a big one, but also because those things were pricey.

Then a godsend for those of us in the middle-class happened; the video game crash. Now, we weren't aware of the crash at the time. There may have been mentions of a downturn on the news in a brief segment occasionally, but it wasn't news that was pervasive. All our parents likely knews was that all of a sudden, home video game hardware and games became a lot less expensive. And I'm very certain my and my friends' parents weren't the only ones who found that.

Our first console was a Coleco Gemini. Yes, Coleco's attempt to undermine Atari by building an Atari 2600 clone. It was a great one, too. The two controllers that came with it (which alone was surprising) had a joystick and a paddle on one controller, the stick on top and the paddle underneath, with a button on the left side. It was extremely comfortable for the time and convenient as you didn't have to buy a paddle controller seperately.

I even preferred it to Atari's own controller, which I found incredibly stiff. Even better, it actually came with games! A novel concept. Of course, it was an easy way to get rid of overstock, as well. It was 1983-84 and companies were probably trying to bail stock as much as possible. So what classics came with it? Mousetrap, a maze game with some interesting mechanics, and... the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong. Coleco were some sneaky bastards, I tell you. "Hey, here's a couple games that we made for the Atari 2600. You may want to check out the Colecovision versions, though. *wink*"

Going forward, I'm going to talk about individual games I played and talking about them with some modern context, where possible. As always, thank you for reading.