stories

[Sgt.Pepper1983]

This topic is mainly for those of you under 30. When you were kids did your parents ever tell you stories like the one my mom told me about the time she saw the Odyssey on display before it was available to the general public? When she was visiting family in New York, I think she said it was 1971, she passed a display at a department store where they were showing off the Odyssey game that looks just like Pong. She asked her aunt if she knew what it was. She described it as a tv game. She asked her aunt why she had never seen one back home and she explained that it was still on trial and only available in New York and LA. My mom says this just blew her mind until she started seeing Pong in arcades about a year or two later. No matter how many times she tells this story she has my complete and undivided attention whenever she talks about things like this.

[Spazmonkey]

This topic is mainly for those of you under 30. When you were kids did your parents ever tell you stories like the one my mom told me about the time she saw the Odyssey on display before it was available to the general public? When she was visiting family in New York, I think she said it was 1971, she passed a display at a department store where they were showing off the Odyssey game that looks just like Pong. She asked her aunt if she knew what it was. She described it as a tv game. She asked her aunt why she had never seen one back home and she explained that it was still on trial and only available in New York and LA. My mom says this just blew her mind until she started seeing Pong in arcades about a year or two later. No matter how many times she tells this story she has my complete and undivided attention whenever she talks about things like this.

 

My mom told me that she got pong once from the sears catalog and that she thought it was so boring that she just flat out asked to send it back. I have yet to play pong, and why would I bother? I enjoy playing atari, but at some point of primitive-ness, it's just an inside joke that is only good if you were there.

Edited May 2, 2009 by Spazmonkey

[STICH666]

My dad played a home built pong machine in 1972 in Puerto Rico.

[FlightSuit]

I was born in 1969. When I was growing up in San Francisco's Excelsior district in the 1970s, there was a coin-op Pong machine in one of the stores on Mission Street. I think the place might have been a deli or an ice cream store or something. I do recall playing Pong on numerous occasions while mom waited for whatever it was she'd ordered.