Popping into YouTube today and this video was recommended:
I totally remember it, too. Game graphics were used in lots of ads but especially anything marketed to kids.
The summer of 1982 marked my transition from elementary school to junior high. It was also the year Tron came out — holy hell that movie amazed me — and PacMan Fever was playing on the radio. Yes it was. Wait, let me share that pain with you. It would be another year before we got an APCO (early Apple clone) personal computer, but we had something akin to a Pong game at that point.
That summer, we pestered our parents to let us play arcade games whenever possible — easily done because they were jammed into corners of laundromats and corner stores and anywhere else the store owner wanted to make a quick buck. Happily, YouTube is full of demos of retro games like Moon Patrol, a fave:
(Yeah, you’re probably not going to want to watch that whole thing.)
Of course, I mostly sucked at games that involve shooting things (I still do, my reflexes are just not fast enough), so something like Galaga — a cross between Centipede and Space Invaders — always left me feeling angry that I’d wasted my quarter:
It wasn’t until the days of Minesweeper and Tetris that I hit my gaming stride. Even then, it was all about the pixels (now there are too many to count) which may be why I love all the retro 8-bit pixel arts and crafts out there, too.