(Today marks AT’s first guest post, courtesy of Griph from Come On, Let’s Go. Not only does he offer another fascinating perspective on “growing up 2600,” but his gracious contribution has also freed up my Saturday afternoon for some long overdue housework. Enjoy!)

I received an Atari 2600 console as a gift-cum-babysitter sometime in the summer of 1991. I was six years old and my mother and I had recently moved to Brooklyn from Leningrad – Leningrad, specifically, and not St. Petersburg, having escaped before the fall. I remember watching, on television, the new Russian flag being hoisted over the Kremlin, angry at the usurpation of the government with which I had grown up. I guess I should consider myself lucky, having gotten over Soviet Chic long before hitting puberty.

Sorry, got a little off-course there. Anyhow, we had moved in with my mother’s new husband, into a second-floor Bensonhurst apartment. To this day I do not know if I received the gift because I had been fascinated with computers since I was able to read (a fascination fed, in the old country, with the only economically available surrogate: book about computers) or because a shoebox of video games was cheaper than hiring a teenage girl to watch over me. (The teenage girls came later, when my mother realized the 15-year-old console did not keep my interest for long enough to not constantly run to our landlord in utter terror.) My mom’s husband hooked the thing up and I was in paradise. Certainly I was behind the curve. Commercials for SNES games had already been airing during the kids’ blocks on television and some of the children of my mom’s better-off friends had NES systems. I didn’t give a damn.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was one of my favorite carts. Whether due to the lingering effects of having seen Return of the Jedi on a bootleg VHS tape in Russia (VCRs were the ultimate household entertainment commodity and my grandmother somehow managed to score one on the gray market,) subliminal implantation of the themes of the trilogy by everpresent toy commercials, or simply because I am some sort of geek Kwisatz Haderach and had the power to tap into untold depths of ancestral nerd-memory, I saw through the graphic abstraction to exactly what I was supposed to do. That’s not to say I was any good at it, of course. Loading it up to get a few screenshots, I immediately recognized the vanilla sky, the staticy thump-thump-thump of the walkers and the searing pew-pew-pew of the snowspeeder’s lasers. However, the memory that hit me the hardest wasn’t a sound effect from the speakers, but from inside my own brain: the “oh-come-on-god-dammit-shit-AGH!” of getting blasted by the damn AT-ATs, flying off course and, occasionally, getting blow’d up.

Many years later, I found myself attending Brooklyn Technical High School, a school of moderate prestige in New York and a vast wasteland of the underachiever. I started spending lunch periods with Dave, the aging hippie and Class of Sixtysomething alumni who ran the chemistry prep room. He had a tiny office between the two chem labs and access to a large chemical storage shelter/disused office that which held a “media center” (read: a rack with a TV and VCR.) After mentioning that was reading about this awesome old show called The Prisoner and how much of a pain in the ass it was to get a hold of a copy (this was during those technological iron-age years, before you could torrent an anime studio’s entire oeuvre with a wink and a nod); a few days later he brought in his bootleg tape and we hung out in that room, inhaling ancient chemicals and watching the adventures of Number 6 in his fairy-tale dystopia. After I had mentioned my love for the 2600, he brought that in as well. As I previously mentioned, I received my cartridges in a shoebox, no manuals and with a number of doubles (I’d play dominoes with them when I got bored of actual gameplay.) I was amazed to see the Fully Monty of the 2600 game, box and manual intact. I mostly played Yar’s Revenge, blasting through the Qotile’s barrier like a man possessed, aiming my Zorlon cannon and … usually getting blown up in the process of firing it. I don’t have much nostalgia for high school but those few short hours, in aggregate, spent in that dusty little room with Dave and Gabriel (an equally asocial and geeky classmate) remain some of my fondest memories.

My last significant experience with the 2600 was during my first nightclub-night. I was nineteen or so, and accompanied my friends to the 80s-upstairs/cybergoth-downstairs night (Re:Mission/Cybertron) at the Pyramid in Alphabet City. Still possessing a good bit of my reclusive tendencies, I found myself at home with the plug-and-play 2600 joystick-console they had set up at the bar to help with the 80s milieu. I can’t put my finger on why, exactly, but blasting through a few levels of Yar’s Revenge upped my esteem and quelled my anxiety just enough to actually get on the dancefloor instead of spending the night holding up the wall like I had imagined I would. To this day I attribute enjoying clubs to that game, the console, and my history with it.

Related posts:

  1. Growing Up 2600: In the beginning
  2. Growing up 2600: A merry disaster
  3. Growing Up 2600: Light from a dead star