Kid Ice
05-02-2007, 05:26 PM
Halloween 1983
That was the only year I truly did not care it was Halloween.
For starters, I had just turned 13. Halloween was kids’ stuff. I had officially entered the ranks of teenhood a few days earlier, and my chosen rite of passage had been to stay up late to watch Friday the 13th Part II on TV with my best friend Kevin.
That year I had made an odd birthday request. Well, two odd requests if you count the Friday the 13th thing. I wanted money. Actually, what I really wanted was a Commodore Vic-20, a couple peripherals, one of those cool joysticks with the triangular shaft and long fire button, and a few games. If I had asked my parents for that stuff, who knows what I would have ended up with…so I asked for money. Specifically, I asked for “money to buy computer stuff”. And Mom and Dad nodded in agreement.
I’m not sure if they totally understood what the cost of computer stuff was, even the humble Commodore Vic-20, because they gave me $50. This roughly approximated what they probably would have spent on a “real” birthday present, so I wasn’t complaining. But it would have been nice if they threw in a little extra cash since clearly a computer of the Vic-20’s capabilities would support my educational endeavors through college and beyond.
So as I climbed into that swank Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra that October afternoon, dreaming along to the sounds of Steely Dan and The Alan Parsons Project on Dad’s in-car cassette player, it wasn’t Halloween that was on my mind. It was “Pac Man With Lasers”. Yes, “Pac Man With Lasers”. With the Commodore Vic-20 and its 4K RAM, I was moving up from mere Atari player to videogame programmer. I mean really, what if Pac Man had lasers like that guy from Berzerk? How cool would that be? I expected to be finished that project within weeks of the Vic-20 purchase. While I was busy becoming a star programmer like David Crane or Alan Miller, my brother and his stupid friends could keep that outdated Atari system….they're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.
Dad pulled up to the front of the Toys R Us and I exited the vehicle like a cannonball fired at the store. Some relatives had sent cash so I had a total of $110, enough for $100 worth of Commodore goodness plus tax. I had already cased the joint weeks ago; this was the equivalent of an “inside job”…I knew where to pick up a shopping cart, where to find everything, and the quickest route to every location.
After retrieving a shopping cart, I moved quickly to the building’s east wing. Here you would see three aisles of long glass cases. The furthest aisle contained videogame consoles, computers and peripherals, and the other aisles contained games. The Vic-20 was in the same location it had been weeks earlier at the same price, $79.95 (for some reason everything was priced something-point-95 in those days). I retrieved the ticket and moved along.
Ah yess, the Toys R Us ticket. For those of you unfamiliar with the TRU ticket system, this is how it worked. You see, videogame consoles and cartridges were too valuable at that time to be manhandled by the unwashed masses. Instead, an empty box for say, Atari VCS Defender, would be prominently displayed in a locked glass case. Attached to the case would be a plastic pocket, holding numerous tickets containing the name, the price in large text, and other miscellaneous info/gobbledygook. Anyone who remembers classic games sold at Toys R can visualize the prices printed on those tickets in that big reverse comic sans font.
So what you would do is take one of these tickets to the cash register, the cashier would ring out your purchase, and then slam a large red “PAID” stamp on it. From here you would take the ticket to a cavernous booth at the front of the store. Dwelling in this booth was the luckiest man who ever lived. This gentleman had unrestricted access to every videogame ever released, piled high up against the wall, in a room that extended so deeply into an inaccessible section of the store that you sometimes would have to ring a bell to summon him. You would hand the man your ticket, and somehow he would magically locate your item in this mountain of boxes. Between the years 1980 and 1985 there was not a single day that I did not dream of becoming that man.
Once I had acquired the ticket for the Vic-20 computer it was time to move on to the software section. Yes, that’s right, my 13 year-old self was about to graduate from games to software. As I turned the corner from the console section, it seemed that the way to the aisle with the Vic-20 software was blocked, so I took a detour down the Atari aisle. At the end of this section the closeout items were kept. This was where one could find items such as VCS Home Run, Mattel Intellivision Snafu, and novelties like the Amiga Joyboard. In other words, it was where they kept all the crap. And everything always sold for $16.95 for some reason, or $8.95 if they were totally desperate.
But not on this day.
As I approached the closeout area, I could see the glass case was not filled with the typical odds and ends for different systems. Instead, there were twenty or so grey, oversized boxes that I did not recognize. They were lined up very neatly as if they had just been placed there that morning; they certainly weren’t there when I had been in the store a few weeks before. I moved closer and still couldn’t tell what the heck was in the boxes, but I could see those memorable TRU tickets, and I could see that every single one of them was priced at…five dollars. Five dollars. Not something-point-95. Just plain old five dollars. This was of great interest to me. Whatever this was they were really desperate to get rid of it. It had to be too cheap to be videogame cartridges though…so what is….wait….it’s THAT?
Berzerk. Five dollars. Star Castle. Five dollars. Spike. Five dollars. Clean Sweep. Five dollars. Yes my friends, Vectrex games for five dollars.
This was a shock. The Vectrex was undoubtedly the coolest thing in the world. It had a self-contained vector monitor. It had a built in game that crapped all over Asteroids. It had a control pad with FOUR buttons. Not those little chicklet keys like you would find on a Colecovision controller, we’re talking shiny black pound-the-shit-out-of-em arcade buttons. The Vectrex was so cool I had never even SEEN one. Nothing is cooler than something you’ve only seen in the pages of EG.
As cool as it was to see these games for five dollars each, it did me little good. Birthday money or not, a Vectrex system was far out of my reach. The system must have cost $200. So I paused for a moment to gaze on the peculiar site of all these kick-ass games priced at only five dollars, then moved along.
Now here’s another surprise. There’s a huge obstruction at the end cap where I would turn the corner to reach the Vic-20 section. Silver boxes, roughly two feet high by a foot and a half wide and deep, stacked up over my head in a cube like configuration. Well, this has to be a bunch of Vectrex systems. Cool! I was actually going to get to LOOK AT a Vectrex box, in real life! Strange that they would be in a huge pile like this and not in the magical booth in front of the store….
Then I notice that each box has a green price sticker. These stickers are small, and the prices printed on them are smaller, and it turns out they should be, because they hide a shameful secret. Because here on the box for the most magnificent piece of videogame hardware you can find in the year of 1983, you find that the Vectrex can be yours for a mere $50.
Discovering this awakened an instinct in me older than the recorded history of man. My body became controlled by a primitive force. First I placed one of these boxes in my shopping cart. Next I deposited the ticket for the Vic-20 in a nearby bin of stuffed animals. Then with inhuman speed and precision I removed the tickets for ten different Vectrex games from ten sleeves. There were five games I wanted for the system and those were the first five I removed, in order of desirability: Star Castle, Berzerk, Scramble, Spinball (yes, Spinball), and Hyperchase. I chose an additional five games nearly at random.
On the way to the register I vaguely felt something was going to happen. I was going to be stopped by someone. Dad was going to come into the store and command me to put it back. The cashier was going to say it was a mistake. Something.
But nothing happened. One Vectrex, 10 Vectrex games, one hundred dollars plus tax. I came to the magical booth with ten tickets and left the store with ten Vectrex games.
I loaded the goods into the back seat of the vehicle. When I climbed in Dad smiled and asked how I’d made out. For the rest of the half hour trip home I explained to him what a Vectrex was. Only 10% of my brain was able to participate in this conversation. The remainder just kept asking the question repeatedly; “Do I really have a Vectrex and 10 games in the back seat of this car?” Previously I would have considered myself lucky to be returning home with a Vic-20 and a single game.
There is not a modern day equivalent to this. I wouldn’t say “It’s like getting a PS3 for $100!” It’s better than that. At the time it felt like the best thing that ever happened to me.
When we arrived home the goodies were quickly unboxed. Dad was disappointed… wasn’t I supposed to use this money to buy a computer? He picked up the box for Rip Off.
“Heh heh, yeah,” he said. “Rip Off, Jeff. RIP OFF.”
Mom agreed. For a 13 year-old to own 10 videogame cartridges was ridiculous…to purchase 10 in a single day was insanity. And what the hell was this Vectrex thing? Another Atari? You have to remember at this time NOBODY owned more than one videogame console. You had a VCS, OR an Odyssey 2, OR an Intellivision, OR a Colecovision, OR a 5200, OR a Vectrex, OR one of those crappy systems no one ever heard of. But you didn’t have more than one in a single household. No.
So I bargained, and in retrospect it must have seemed like quite a sacrifice. I would sell my Atari and all my VCS cartridges to pay for a computer. Therefore, I would not own two videogame consoles, I would own a videogame console and a computer. It was hard for my parents to believe that I wanted to keep this Vectrex thing so much that I would sell my most beloved possession. I think what it came down to was that Dad didn’t feel like driving back to the Deptford Toys R Us.
I had pulled it off.
That night I unboxed and played every single game. I threw the boxes and instructions in the trash. I also trashed the overlays…I preferred the stark appearance of the black and white vector display.
Months later I kept the promise to my parents and sold all my Atari stuff. I fell in love with the Vic-20 and soon realized that 4K of RAM was not enough for “Pac Man With Lasers”. That summer I sold the Vectrex to my friend Jimmy for $28…exactly enough money purchase a Vic-20 16K RAM expansion cartridge.
That was the only year I truly did not care it was Halloween.
For starters, I had just turned 13. Halloween was kids’ stuff. I had officially entered the ranks of teenhood a few days earlier, and my chosen rite of passage had been to stay up late to watch Friday the 13th Part II on TV with my best friend Kevin.
That year I had made an odd birthday request. Well, two odd requests if you count the Friday the 13th thing. I wanted money. Actually, what I really wanted was a Commodore Vic-20, a couple peripherals, one of those cool joysticks with the triangular shaft and long fire button, and a few games. If I had asked my parents for that stuff, who knows what I would have ended up with…so I asked for money. Specifically, I asked for “money to buy computer stuff”. And Mom and Dad nodded in agreement.
I’m not sure if they totally understood what the cost of computer stuff was, even the humble Commodore Vic-20, because they gave me $50. This roughly approximated what they probably would have spent on a “real” birthday present, so I wasn’t complaining. But it would have been nice if they threw in a little extra cash since clearly a computer of the Vic-20’s capabilities would support my educational endeavors through college and beyond.
So as I climbed into that swank Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra that October afternoon, dreaming along to the sounds of Steely Dan and The Alan Parsons Project on Dad’s in-car cassette player, it wasn’t Halloween that was on my mind. It was “Pac Man With Lasers”. Yes, “Pac Man With Lasers”. With the Commodore Vic-20 and its 4K RAM, I was moving up from mere Atari player to videogame programmer. I mean really, what if Pac Man had lasers like that guy from Berzerk? How cool would that be? I expected to be finished that project within weeks of the Vic-20 purchase. While I was busy becoming a star programmer like David Crane or Alan Miller, my brother and his stupid friends could keep that outdated Atari system….they're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.
Dad pulled up to the front of the Toys R Us and I exited the vehicle like a cannonball fired at the store. Some relatives had sent cash so I had a total of $110, enough for $100 worth of Commodore goodness plus tax. I had already cased the joint weeks ago; this was the equivalent of an “inside job”…I knew where to pick up a shopping cart, where to find everything, and the quickest route to every location.
After retrieving a shopping cart, I moved quickly to the building’s east wing. Here you would see three aisles of long glass cases. The furthest aisle contained videogame consoles, computers and peripherals, and the other aisles contained games. The Vic-20 was in the same location it had been weeks earlier at the same price, $79.95 (for some reason everything was priced something-point-95 in those days). I retrieved the ticket and moved along.
Ah yess, the Toys R Us ticket. For those of you unfamiliar with the TRU ticket system, this is how it worked. You see, videogame consoles and cartridges were too valuable at that time to be manhandled by the unwashed masses. Instead, an empty box for say, Atari VCS Defender, would be prominently displayed in a locked glass case. Attached to the case would be a plastic pocket, holding numerous tickets containing the name, the price in large text, and other miscellaneous info/gobbledygook. Anyone who remembers classic games sold at Toys R can visualize the prices printed on those tickets in that big reverse comic sans font.
So what you would do is take one of these tickets to the cash register, the cashier would ring out your purchase, and then slam a large red “PAID” stamp on it. From here you would take the ticket to a cavernous booth at the front of the store. Dwelling in this booth was the luckiest man who ever lived. This gentleman had unrestricted access to every videogame ever released, piled high up against the wall, in a room that extended so deeply into an inaccessible section of the store that you sometimes would have to ring a bell to summon him. You would hand the man your ticket, and somehow he would magically locate your item in this mountain of boxes. Between the years 1980 and 1985 there was not a single day that I did not dream of becoming that man.
Once I had acquired the ticket for the Vic-20 computer it was time to move on to the software section. Yes, that’s right, my 13 year-old self was about to graduate from games to software. As I turned the corner from the console section, it seemed that the way to the aisle with the Vic-20 software was blocked, so I took a detour down the Atari aisle. At the end of this section the closeout items were kept. This was where one could find items such as VCS Home Run, Mattel Intellivision Snafu, and novelties like the Amiga Joyboard. In other words, it was where they kept all the crap. And everything always sold for $16.95 for some reason, or $8.95 if they were totally desperate.
But not on this day.
As I approached the closeout area, I could see the glass case was not filled with the typical odds and ends for different systems. Instead, there were twenty or so grey, oversized boxes that I did not recognize. They were lined up very neatly as if they had just been placed there that morning; they certainly weren’t there when I had been in the store a few weeks before. I moved closer and still couldn’t tell what the heck was in the boxes, but I could see those memorable TRU tickets, and I could see that every single one of them was priced at…five dollars. Five dollars. Not something-point-95. Just plain old five dollars. This was of great interest to me. Whatever this was they were really desperate to get rid of it. It had to be too cheap to be videogame cartridges though…so what is….wait….it’s THAT?
Berzerk. Five dollars. Star Castle. Five dollars. Spike. Five dollars. Clean Sweep. Five dollars. Yes my friends, Vectrex games for five dollars.
This was a shock. The Vectrex was undoubtedly the coolest thing in the world. It had a self-contained vector monitor. It had a built in game that crapped all over Asteroids. It had a control pad with FOUR buttons. Not those little chicklet keys like you would find on a Colecovision controller, we’re talking shiny black pound-the-shit-out-of-em arcade buttons. The Vectrex was so cool I had never even SEEN one. Nothing is cooler than something you’ve only seen in the pages of EG.
As cool as it was to see these games for five dollars each, it did me little good. Birthday money or not, a Vectrex system was far out of my reach. The system must have cost $200. So I paused for a moment to gaze on the peculiar site of all these kick-ass games priced at only five dollars, then moved along.
Now here’s another surprise. There’s a huge obstruction at the end cap where I would turn the corner to reach the Vic-20 section. Silver boxes, roughly two feet high by a foot and a half wide and deep, stacked up over my head in a cube like configuration. Well, this has to be a bunch of Vectrex systems. Cool! I was actually going to get to LOOK AT a Vectrex box, in real life! Strange that they would be in a huge pile like this and not in the magical booth in front of the store….
Then I notice that each box has a green price sticker. These stickers are small, and the prices printed on them are smaller, and it turns out they should be, because they hide a shameful secret. Because here on the box for the most magnificent piece of videogame hardware you can find in the year of 1983, you find that the Vectrex can be yours for a mere $50.
Discovering this awakened an instinct in me older than the recorded history of man. My body became controlled by a primitive force. First I placed one of these boxes in my shopping cart. Next I deposited the ticket for the Vic-20 in a nearby bin of stuffed animals. Then with inhuman speed and precision I removed the tickets for ten different Vectrex games from ten sleeves. There were five games I wanted for the system and those were the first five I removed, in order of desirability: Star Castle, Berzerk, Scramble, Spinball (yes, Spinball), and Hyperchase. I chose an additional five games nearly at random.
On the way to the register I vaguely felt something was going to happen. I was going to be stopped by someone. Dad was going to come into the store and command me to put it back. The cashier was going to say it was a mistake. Something.
But nothing happened. One Vectrex, 10 Vectrex games, one hundred dollars plus tax. I came to the magical booth with ten tickets and left the store with ten Vectrex games.
I loaded the goods into the back seat of the vehicle. When I climbed in Dad smiled and asked how I’d made out. For the rest of the half hour trip home I explained to him what a Vectrex was. Only 10% of my brain was able to participate in this conversation. The remainder just kept asking the question repeatedly; “Do I really have a Vectrex and 10 games in the back seat of this car?” Previously I would have considered myself lucky to be returning home with a Vic-20 and a single game.
There is not a modern day equivalent to this. I wouldn’t say “It’s like getting a PS3 for $100!” It’s better than that. At the time it felt like the best thing that ever happened to me.
When we arrived home the goodies were quickly unboxed. Dad was disappointed… wasn’t I supposed to use this money to buy a computer? He picked up the box for Rip Off.
“Heh heh, yeah,” he said. “Rip Off, Jeff. RIP OFF.”
Mom agreed. For a 13 year-old to own 10 videogame cartridges was ridiculous…to purchase 10 in a single day was insanity. And what the hell was this Vectrex thing? Another Atari? You have to remember at this time NOBODY owned more than one videogame console. You had a VCS, OR an Odyssey 2, OR an Intellivision, OR a Colecovision, OR a 5200, OR a Vectrex, OR one of those crappy systems no one ever heard of. But you didn’t have more than one in a single household. No.
So I bargained, and in retrospect it must have seemed like quite a sacrifice. I would sell my Atari and all my VCS cartridges to pay for a computer. Therefore, I would not own two videogame consoles, I would own a videogame console and a computer. It was hard for my parents to believe that I wanted to keep this Vectrex thing so much that I would sell my most beloved possession. I think what it came down to was that Dad didn’t feel like driving back to the Deptford Toys R Us.
I had pulled it off.
That night I unboxed and played every single game. I threw the boxes and instructions in the trash. I also trashed the overlays…I preferred the stark appearance of the black and white vector display.
Months later I kept the promise to my parents and sold all my Atari stuff. I fell in love with the Vic-20 and soon realized that 4K of RAM was not enough for “Pac Man With Lasers”. That summer I sold the Vectrex to my friend Jimmy for $28…exactly enough money purchase a Vic-20 16K RAM expansion cartridge.