CN feels less alone now:
Much to my surprise, I was leafing through Sports Illustrated’s 50th Anniversary issue and in the sports trends timeline section, Intellivision Football was featured to represent sports in the video game era. I was the only kid I knew who had it back then. Everyone else was pretending those Space Invaders on a blinking green and yellow Atari screen were football players.
Obviously, the movers and shakers of tomorrow were Intellivision fans. I was hugely into NFL Football, although I couldn’t find anyone to play it with me since I owned my brother and few people had the patience to play the real-time 15-minute quarters. The Sports Guy is an Intellivision guy too, of course.
One of my great video game triumphs was matching up with my cousin Todd about nine years ago. He’d been talking and talking about how good he had been at NFL Football when he moved to town, but he didn’t realize we had at least one of everything at the Digital Ghetto. (And I mean everything, Bally, Vectrex, Sega Nomad, you name it. An Intellivision was downright mainstream and we had all the models). Anyhow, we played a quarter and I beat him something like 35-0. Like riding a bike….
However, Big Chilly owns the single most impressive video game moment I’ve ever seen. We had a massive Christmas party and hooked up game systems all over the house. Big Chilly practically missed the whole thing, however, as he’d been challenged to a game of 1942, which he’d never played before, on the Atari Jaguar. He blew through the entire game without losing a single plane, chuckled, and handed the controller to an awestruck Micron before heading upstairs.