Here and here are a couple of hilarious articles where a computer gaming magazine sat eleven-year-old kids down and had them play classic computer games, like Pong, Space Invaders and Defender. With no sense of nostalgia or history, they conclude the games are dumb. My favorite exchange was this (in which they’re talking about Defender):
EGM: Before this came out in compilations, we used to put quarters in arcade machines.
Parker: You wasted quarters in this?
EGM: Yeah.
Parker: That’s so sad.
About PONG:
My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.
About E.T. (shouldn’t that count as child abuse?)
Maybe another movie company that didn’t want you to like E.T. made this game.
In the section about “Adventure”:
Dillon: And to think 20 years from now, people are going to think, “Oh, you’re playing [GameCube Zelda game] Wind Waker? That’s boring.”
EGM: What are you going to say when your kids say Wind Waker looks boring?
Parker: Get out of my house. You’re out of my will.
I was debating about getting into a “kids these days don’t know how good they’ve got it”, but it’ll probably be better if I don’t.
These kids crack me up. They should get their own show. MST3K but with videogames.
On Pong:
On Donkey Kong:
On Space Invaders:
I was laughing so hard at the ET portion of the interview, I was in tears. Literally. That almost never happens to me. I’m lucky nobody’s around at work right now.
That’s great! I am sending this link to every techno-geek I’m still friends with from junior high.
Brian: What’s this supposed to be?
EGM: Football. It’s one of the first great portable games.
Brian: I thought it was Run Away From the Dots.
John: I don’t see how this has anything remotely to do with football.
EGM: Which team are you playing?
Kirk: The red lines.
Tim: They could’ve just as easily called this game anything—Baseball, Bowling, Escape From the Monsters.
EGM: Did you score?
Kirk: I bumped into a dot.
EGM: When you lose all your lives, you have to start over. You don’t keep going. Parker: And you guys back then were OK with this?
The exchange during GTAI where they roll their eyes at the notion that the game is a bad influence, and they show they know the difference between actions in a fantasy game and actions in the real world, is also pretty good.
These kids are definitely funny. The first article is a classic. I got the impression during the recent second article, though, that they knew they were funny and they were going for jabs. Either they got praised to death after the first one, or they were chosen for these attributes in the first place.
I thought was a little strange, considering how they acted in the first article, that in the second article they were saying things like “this game is classic” and, “I played this when I was little.”
It does make me miss arcades though. I clearly remember when Gauntlet was the killer app and people by no means minded standing in line to play it.
You think that’s bad. A few years ago, a co-worker and I went to the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York to attend a lecture. We wandered through the exhibits before the lecture started, including a museum exhibit on the history of the coin-op video game. Nothing like seeing video games you played as a child in a museum, with little explanatory cards detailing the historical significance of each (e.g., This was the first vector graphics game and was released in 198X.) to make one feel old.
Well, it’s a different set of kids and a different set of video games in the second article. I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine that the kids would be familiar with the original Legend of Zelda or Street Fighter II since they re-release those games in packs all the time. Plus, older siblings may have old systems lying around that they play.
I think the first article went so well that EGM tried to get the exact same thing by screening the kids a bit more. That never works out the way people intend.
Ah, I remember the games being slightly newer but I thought they whole hook of the article was that they were the same kids (they certainly act the same :dubious:.) Looking back, I see that you’re right; they are different kids.
:rolleyes: No kidding. I think I was 11 or 12 when Pong came out and we thought it was just amazing.
When my own kids comment on the supposed lameness of graphics in today’s games, I always bring up Pong.
“It was just a white dot and and a two white lines! That’s it! And we LIKED IT!”
I remember walking to the bank, withdrawing $5 from my savings account, riding the bus across town to the mall where the arcade was, zipping through 20 quarters in about 10 minutes, and then riding the bus home.
I wonder what those kids would say about that. I know what MY kids would say.
Yeah. While I like the articles and think they’re funny, there is no way in hell that I believe they’re spontaneous or that the kids are actually saying that without coaching.
I also wonder if these articles are made up. One of the kids refers to the film Gleaming the Cube, and the whole “Zangief’s a Nazi!” conversation, though funny, makes me wonder if kids really don’t know the difference between a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle. I’ve heard of Pac-Man champ Billy Mitchell, but I don’t know how many kids could identify him by name.
That said, some highlights (comments from EGM staffers are in bold)
