There were many video game systems that were released in the 80's: Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800, Colecovision, Intellivision, and of course, the original, PONG! There's another cool Pong site out there worth checking out!

I will not attempt to explain all of the history of video games to you, because The History of Video Games site already does a great job of that! I'm just going to give you a bit of background on my experiences with the various systems, and just let you decide what you liked/didn't like best.

I can remember vividly my parents purchasing my brothers and I our first version of Pong, to go on a 13 inch black and white TV. Of course, by being the oldest, I was able to annihilate my brothers every time we played, and if I got too far behind, the reset button was never hard to find!

As Pong grew old, and boring, my brothers and I had to find new challenges. We would go over to our next door neighbors' house and play the Atari 2600 until long past bedtime, which caused Mom to become quite frustrated and convince my step-father to finally purchase us an old, used, 2600. Of course, buying from a yard sale is a sure sign that at least one, usually both of the controllers will not function correctly, so fights would ensue over who got the "good controller" and what type of handicaps the lucky one would have to do to make it a "fairer fight."

Our Atari finally died, and we had a little more money to spend, so my parents bought us a Colecovision, which came with one of the easiest games of all time, the Smurfs. Kicking Gargamel's butt was fun for a while, but even that got old, so we eventually conned our parents into buying us Donkey Kong. This game was great forever, and I still enjoy playing this game at my favorite local hangout.

One last note: I never owned an Intellivision. I only got to play it at my cousin's Brenda's house, and then usually only Burger Time. Sorry I don't have more memories than that for you abou this system.

There is a lot of information on the net about the classic video game systems: just do a netsearch on any of these in Hotbot or any other search engine and see what you get. A great page for classic arcade art is RetroGames.

I hope you liked my classic video game page. There are tons of video game emulators out on the net to download and try to recapture YOUR youth. Give 'em a try, and tell them Phil G sent ya! That's all for now.