I remember about five years ago, Sony–for some reason, it must have been a convention or something–released kind of a similar catalog of their first-party and a few third-party offerings. God of War was in there and it just meant so much to me that I was in sort of a coming soon catalog, because I have such fond memories of the 2600 catalogs with that just great cartoony art and stuff. I mean, I’ll ramble for hours my friend, because those days were so formative for me, even to the box art of the Atari 2600 carts. I have the most influential Atari 2600 games hanging in my office: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Yar’s Revenge, Dodge ‘em, and Adventure, which is still one of my all time favorite games, and Combat. And obviously then moving on to ColecoVision and the Apple II E, and the TRS-80 from Radio Shack and then NES. From there, it was just every system that came out. The one I didn’t have was I didn’t get a SNES.
And I remember in my interview to be a tester at Sony, I got made fun of by the other testers because I was intimidated by the number of buttons on the SNES controller. Because I only had a Genesis in my apartment. And they were like, don’t hire this guy. He’s intimated by a freakin’ video game controller. But, I didn’t have that one. But, pretty much barring that one and the Odyssey, I pretty much had every system.
When you talk about gamers and owning consoles, we all have gaps, right? But it sounds like your gaps are not terribly significant.
No, no, they weren’t. The biggest gap was when the industry crashed. Everybody was playing their 2600s around ‘81, ‘82. And it wasn’t until I guess, ‘86 that another relevant console was on the market. I just remember around 84 or ‘85 going, man, what’s going to replace the Atari? There was the ColecoVision gap, but it didn’t really fit the need. Although Coleco was pretty awesome, there weren’t that many games for it. it never hit the popular consciousness. It was kind of like, yeah-yeah, you have a Coleco, Donkey Kong works really great on it, but it wasn’t like the Atari, and it wasn’t like the NES, that really kind of became sort of a geek touchstone. I was on the Apple II, by then. And I had kind of forgotten, oh yeah, you could hook these up to your TV. Because after the 2600, I immediately migrated on to my Apple.