In my year-long project, June is 1970s month. In video gaming this means Pong, Atari 2600, arcade games and various LED handhelds.
I played Pong on the TV with my sister. It was a Radio Shack console called TV Scoreboard. It came out in 1976. I was 9. I don't think I played the arcade machine, but maybe.
A year later, out came the Atari 2600. My dad was big on getting the latest gadgets, and so one Christmas an Atari showed up under the tree. I think it was 1979 and the six-swtich model, the second version of the 2600.
Me and my two sisters, and various neighborhood kids played many games on this device. My favorties in the 70s were Adventure, Bowling, Canyon Bomber and Sky Diver.
I never had, or really knew about the Odyssey console back then. I only found out about it in the 90s when I started to collect video games and systems. The Magnavox Odyssey 2 was out in '78. I remember seeing one at a flea market. I wanted to play the Quest for the Rings game on it. I don't think I ever did though.
Most of the arcade games I played were actually in the 80s but there was Space Invaders in '78, Asteroids, Galaxian and Lunar Lander in '79. Lunar Lander was my favorite. I used to ride my bike to the local mall where there was an arcade called Space Port.
Between myself and the kids in the neighborhood, there were a lot of dedicated video game machines around. I had the Mattel Electronics Baseball LED game shown below. One friend next door to me had the Football one and another Basketball. So us kids would convene at each other's houses and play whatever the host had. It was mostly Baseball and Football. Football was so popular at my friend's place that we wore the keys right off the machine.
Others were Merlin, which could play games like Tic-Tac-Toe or even record music you played on the keypad; Coleco's Football game, very similar to Mattel's; Battlestar Gallactica Space Alert; and Bambino Boxing (shown below where I saw it at a convention).
Certainly video games weren't the only games us kids played in the 70s. Video games weren't that time consuming back then, so many other games were played. Board games, sports, minibike riding (that's a small motorcycle my neighbor's brother had and us smaller kids sometimes got to ride), winter sledding and pond ice hockey, bike riding, model building, model rocketry, model railroading, slot car racing; you name it, we probably played it. The 70s were pretty good times for us kids living in a fairly wealthy suburb. Kind of like Goonies, perhaps.
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