Blackburst Game Development

Let me tell you about myself. I’m 27 and like most kids from the 80s, I’ve played video games pretty much all of my life.  As it is now, I’m the proud owner of pretty much every console generation since the pong days. When I went to school, I took my lunch to school in a Super Mario Bros. 2 box. I showered using Mario shampoo. I ate the Nintendo Breakfast System and Pac-Man cereal more often than Christian Bale screams at lighting technicians. I know and love video games more than anyone I’ve ever met.

I forget exactly how old I was. I was visiting my older cousins in Virginia while my parents scoped out places for us to move from New York City to.  The youngest of my cousins got out a small black box and pulls out his antenna from his black and white zenith in his room, and hooks it up to the TV. I knew what video games were; it’s kind of hard not to know when you live in New York City. My dad’s restaurant had Galaga and Centipede machines in it. My uncle would take me to the movies on 42^nd street and let me play Star Wars. I believe the Odd-Lot my mom worked at even had a Donkey Kong machine. I’d seen them before, but I had never actually played one intently.

He hands me this bizarre controller with a joystick on one end and a rotating paddle on the other. With the flip of a switch the game started. I had plenty of trouble at first. I was unable to jump over the barrels, and the ones that roll down the ladders constantly kill me. It took a while, but I did finally get past the first level. No easy feat for anyone who’s just picked up a controller.  I played the game that we all know and love as Donkey Kong all afternoon until my cousin pulled out a copy of Pac-Man. I knew who Pac-Man was because of the cartoon I used to watch on channel 11 in New York. I also used to watch my mom and dad play Ms. Pac-Man in the Greek pizzeria below our apartment in Queens. We know this game to be the inferior port it is now, but at the time I didn’t or couldn’t care; it was Pac-Man.

Throughout the afternoon, my cousins swapped their meager collection of carts in and out of the system. They introduced me to the essentials: Galaxian, Warlords, Asteroids, Pitfall. They were all there. My cousins got a kick out of watching me try to figure out what was going on in each game. Trying to see what my barely formed mind was attempting to do for strategy.  For someone as young as I was, I was doing pretty well. My favorite game we were playing was Galaxian. Shooting small blobs that sort of resembled bugs made me smile and laugh. As I fought wave after wave, I began wishing and hoping I could do this all day every day.

Unfortunately, my parents had finished the apartment hunt and had come to take me back on a train to New York. I begged, cried, and pleaded to just stay and play more games. Seeing how much I loved playing with them, the eldest of my cousins gets a shoe box and packed it up with the games and the system. He was the one who started the addiction. On the way back to New York I held the Gemini Universal Command stick in my hand and pretended I was the one controlling everyone on the train.

As soon as we got home, my dad set up the system and I started playing. I not only remember this vividly because it was my first experience with video games, it’s also one of the few memories I have of childhood that I can recall. I have never stopped gaming since, and I doubt I ever will.