[Coda]

I remember playing a LOT of games when I was a kid, and tons of those stick in memory. I remember playing a bunch of text adventures (mostly Adventureland, but also Adventure in Time and others) and even trying to write one of my own (until I hit a bug in the programming language I was using). I remember playing Agent USA and Where in America's Past is Carmen Sandiego and Stickybear Spellgrabber. I remember playing Number Munchers -- LOTS of Number Munchers. I played Mario Bros (the ORIGINAL Mario Bros, not Super Mario Bros) and Burgertime and Ms. Pac-Man and Defender II and Choplifter and Marble Madness and Boulder Dash and Jungle Hunt and Spy Hunter and Frogger and Pitfall II and Dig Dug and Joust. I played Battle Chess and Tetris and Pipe Dreams and Loopz and Shanghai and Lemmings. I played Battlezone and Silent Service and Tomahawk and F-21 Retaliator. I played King's Quest III and Space Quest and Police Quest. (Yeah, I probably shouldn't have been playing that last one as a kid.) For some reason I played Hardball! but that's about the only sports game I paid much attention to. I played SimCity and Lemonade Stand (and found a bug in that).

I could start descending into a list of games most of you would have never heard of -- Pengo, Bouncing Kamungas, Seven Cities of Gold, Tass Times in Tone Town, Zany Golf, Mean 18, BC's Quest for Tires, Diamond Mine (my mom played that a TON), Pentapus, Outpost, Repton, Lunch Time (an unauthorized Pac-Man clone starring Pac-Man Jr), Dogfight II, Air Cars (a Light Cycle clone), Bats in the Belfry, Handy Dandy, Bellhop, Gumball. Some of them I remember playing but they had generic names so I don't know what they were called. (One of them I know I played a LOT of, and even remember that the first level had a safe spot at the right edge of the screen. Another one, I just managed to luck out in looking up the name of Outworld.) Some games I played were so obscure there's no trace of them left on the Internet -- it's entirely possible I may have some of the only extant copies in my closet.

I had an Intellivision II before I ever had an NES, but while I have clear memories of playing it a lot I don't remember what games I had for it aside from poker and tennis, and looking through a list of games released for it doesn't actually help me. (I know I had the AD&D game for it, but my parents made me throw it away before I could play it.) I wanted to play Tron: Deadly Discs but I could never find a copy before my mom forced me to sell the Intellivision before she'd let me get an NES.

And I WROTE my own games, too. Most of them were pretty awful. XD But I was a little kid, so it was all about having fun making them. (And frankly, this nostalgia of thinking about all of these old games is making me want to make something right now.)

If I go later into my youth I start getting into more games that modern audiences would be familiar with... but by then I wasn't really a little kid anymore. Aside from the rare opportunity to play on friends' and family's game systems, I was 10 before I played my first Super Mario game.