Memorable Gaming Moments

I’ve spend a good part of this past week marveling at how incredibly good Gears of War for the Xbox 360 is. I’ve played some great games on different platforms over the past year but this is by far the greatest step forward in console gaming. It got me thinking about some other memorable moments in my gaming life. I’d like to hear about any of your own gaming moments as well.

1. Atari 2600 Adventure Easter Egg
My parents got us an Atari 2600 a good year after it had already been popular. It was a bid surprise for us one Christmas morning as we never believed our parents could afford such a high-tech piece of equipment. They hooked it up to an old 19 inch black and white television in our back room. We had previously only had a Coleco TV Hockey and skeet shooting electronic game that broke fairly quickly. It had a cool plastic rifle that you could use to shoot a large bouncing square on the TV. This was fun for about 10 minutes then we would aim it at each other and play army. The 2600 was amazing in comparison! We only had Combat (the pack-in cartridge) and Space Invaders at first. We played the hell out of these carts and never got bored. Then one day my Dad came home from work and told us that his co-worker had lent him an Atari game for the weekend! The game was called Adventure. We hurriedly put the game cartridge in and spent hours being amazed by the complex maze of labyrinths and impending peril of a bouncing duck that would have you get stuck in its belly. After using a crude magnet to grab a bridge and return the chalice we were ready to try the harder difficulty levels. This was amazing – there were dark corridors where open rooms used to be! So amazing! We played that for hours. Then I talked to my friend who said, “Oh did you see the Easter Egg?”. I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. So he came over and spent a few minutes grabbing a hidden dot (Egg) which allowed him to go through walls and there was a secret message, “Created by Warren Miller”! For those of you who have never done this trick here are the instructions:

1. Get the bridge
2. Take it inside the black castle
3. Find the central room that causes the screen to flicker even when there are no objects in it
4. Use the bridge to get into the secret chamber in the middle of that room
5. Inside that the secret chamber there is a "dot" -- pick it up
6. Take the dot to the main hall way (below the golden castle)
7. Once here the dot will cause one of the hallway barriers to disappear
8. You can then enter a hidden chamber that list a message from the programmers



2. Solving Atari 2600 Raiders of the Lost Ark
Games progressed along nicely on the Atari 2600 as programmers figured out how to better exploit the little power that it had. I was blown away at the amount of detail and content included in the game Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was before the time of pausing or saving games so you really had to be dedicated and more importantly... completely done with your homework. I played this over and over getting further each time. However, after hours and hours of play I had hit a brick wall. There was no Prima Guide or Internet forum to turn to in those days so I just sulked. Then one glorious day I saw an ad in a magazine to send a few bucks and a self addressed envelope to Atari for a special Raiders tip sheet. I couldn’t believe it! I put cash and the return envelope in a larger envelope and sent it off. Over a month later it arrived. A crappy little folded up piece of red paper with Raiders of the Lost Ark tips photocopied on it. THERE IT WAS – THE CLUE I WAS MISSING!!!!! “Walk off the side of mesa and immediately use your parachute. Now carefully guide Indy past the tree branch and into the hole on the side of the mesa.” Holy Sh!t, there was a hole on the side of that damn mountain! I fired up my cartridge and played straight through to the part that had held up so many previous attempts and finished the game on my first try. I sighed, took a big swig of my RC Cola and didn’t play that game again until I discovered the Stella PC emulator many moons later.


3. 2600 Crazy Climber Mail order madness
My parents were sick of my videogame obsession at an early age. Every time I would get some cash for my birthday or Christmas I would spend it on new cartridges. They would always try to talk me out of it. I subscribed to the most awesome Atari Age magazine which I waited impatiently for each month (or every other month – can’t remember). That damn magazine had all kinds of stuff in it that NEVER came out. I would drool over 2600 keyboards and highly inaccurate screen shots of 2600 Defender and Pole Position. Anyway, they offered an Atari Age exclusive cartridge of Crazy Climber one issue. I nearly wet my pants. I had only played Crazy Climber a few times at the local Zodys department store and never seemed to have enough change to get very far but was hooked. Here was my chance to play it at home! I think it was like 29.95 plus shipping and my parents flat out refused to help me order it. I didn’t have a credit card or checking account. I HAD to have it though! I asked my friend if his Mom would order it for me if I paid her cash. No problem! It arrived many weeks later and I was very happy with the game. Later on Atari Age offered Video Cube and Gyruss and I think Gravitar to their members. I saw some of these at a Sears clearance many years later, but never good old Crazy Climber! One day many years later I came home from school and my younger brother told me that his school was having a fund raiser and he had sold all of my Atari cartridges... Crazy Climber included. I don’t think I have ever been so angry up until then. Sure I ordered an expensive copy of the game off eBay but... it just wasn’t the same. So sad.



4. Colecovision Donkey Kong
We couldn’t afford the fancy new Colecovision so I had to ride my bike over to my friend Craig’s house to check it out when he got it. His parents had recently gone through a divorce and so he and his brother got lots of cool toys. They had Colecovision with that ridiculous giant baseball controller, Smurfs, Time Pilot, Baseball, Turbo with the wheel and of course Donkey Kong. I had never seen such a good replica of an arcade game before. Atari games never quite looked like the real thing, but Colecovision kicked ass! It was just like the Donkey Kong we used to play down at the liquor store but it was free! I spent many afternoons after school over there but never actually got to own a real Colecovision until I was an adult.


5. TurboGrafx CD Add-on module and It Came From the Desert
In about 1989 I had a nice collection of turbografx16 games going, but I just couldn’t afford the one million dollar CD add-on. The games looked kick ass but I just couldn’t afford it. After a while Sega Genesis and SNES really cut this fine console out of the race and the price for the CD add-on finally dropped. I bought it and played Ys book I & II through to the end right off. I played Valis, JB Harold, Sherlock Holmes and Last Alert marveling at the cartoon like cut scenes. I bought some crappy Japanese import games where I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but it was fun. I kept seeing advertisements for a game in production called, “It Came From the Desert”. This thing had digitized actors and giant ants! I waited and waited and waited but it never came out. Finally, I ran into some financial problems and ended up selling my entire kick-ass collection of Turbografx16 games and hardware (yes, Turbo Express and import Hu-Card converter thingy included) for a measly $450.00. A few months after selling it all (oh it still stings!) I saw that damn giant ant game on display at a Babbages and cursed my luck! As an adult I purchased a copy on eBay and tried to play it in a few emulators but it just sits at the title screen... cruel irony. TurboDuos go for way too much on eBay now so I just have to wait, but someday I’ll play this damn game all the way through.


6. Super Nintendo Jurassic Park
The Atari Jaguar was just too expensive for me back in the day. I had a Jones for Doom but just couldn’t afford it. Then I saw some screen shots for Jurassic Park for the SNES and knew this was just the thing to get my mind off Doom. I rented this cart from a Blockbuster video and played it through to the end over the weekend. It was such an awesome first person dino shooter. Great music, puzzles and suspense! That may have been the most fun I had with my SNES next to FFIII and Donkey Kong Country. There was a sequel but it turned out to be some lame side-scroller. There are other dinosaur shooters but this was way ahead of it’s time.

7. Dreamcast Import Mod-Chip Fiasco
So there I was in line at EB Games to pick up my Sega Dreamcast pre-order on 9/9/99. It was exciting! I hadn’t been really into the previous generation Playstation or N64 and was ready for a kick-ass 3D game console. The clerk talked me into getting this special protection plan that he said would get me a replacement if ANYTHING happened to the Dreamcast. I got it home and was totally blown away by the graphics in Sonic Adventure – chased by a whale! It was great! I subscribed to the official DC mag and looked forward to new releases each month. I had dial-up Internet access at the time and could surf the web using my DC which was cool for the time. I started to come across many websites showing Japanese Dreamcast games that I couldn’t play! I couldn’t have that! One day I read about a “mod-chip” that would let you play import games and it only had 4 wires. I ordered the chip and when it came took apart my DC and marveled at how small the solder pads were. Look, I’m not going to sugar coat this – I destroyed my Dreamcast because of my lame soldering skills. Well, I took it back to EB Games and said it stopped working. The dude put it in a box and gave me a brand new unit just like that! I went home and practiced soldering on an old modem and got pretty good. I was able to salvage the old mod-chip but had some Asian kid put it in for me. After that I was able to play Resident Evil 2 before it came out in the states. That was awesome!


8. Xbox and Halo
I had gotten a PS2 on launch day but was not particularly thrilled with it. There was a steady stream of crappy games that my pocket book was getting screwed by. The graphics weren’t that much better than my Dreamcast and it was more fun to play. I already had a DVD player so I didn’t really care about the PS2 DVD player, besides you had to buy a 3rd party remote for it. I heard about Microsoft coming out with a game system and was intrigued. I pre-ordered my unit along with Halo, Shrek and Oddworld. When I got that system home I tried Oddworld out first. It looked good but was kind of boring. Shrek looked good but was not much fun. Then I put in the game that I would be playing for the next year – Halo. I kept telling my wife how awesome the game was and she’d say something polite like, “that’s nice, I’m glad you’re enjoying it”. She never understood why I like games so much and wasn’t very happy when I spend even more money on the Gamecube launch shortly after. Halo – so awesome! Large unique levels with interesting weapons and enemies - perfect pacing and beautiful music. The best game I had ever played up until then. Obviously I wasn’t alone in this experience. Eventually, I would find some great PS2 games and that system got some use as well but nothing compared to Halo.


These are just a few great memories of gaming. What are some of yours?