The OG Game

My first video game was a 1970s classic which I am old enough to have played not long after it was first released in the UK. It plugged into the TV and it looked like the future. That game was Pong!

For those of you who have never seen it, Pong was a game with a tennis court layout and goals at either end through which players could score. You used joysticks to control one or two rectangular players who hit a square ball. I found out from that first game that my hand eye coordination was pretty much non existent when it comes to screen based games and that has remained the case to this day! Everyone who came round to play it enjoyed it and beat me at it. After about six months it was sitting in a box gathering dust as I realised that I was never going to be any good at it.

I wonder now if I should have stuck with it? Given my dyspraxia it would have been a good idea and maybe I would have been better when I got a ZX Spectrum, another screen based system that ended up gathering dust after about six months. That one I paid for myself and it wasn’t cheap but I stopped using it and ended up throwing it away if memory serves me correctly.

I do play screen based games on my phone but they are games like Arrows where there is no time limit and you can take as long as you like over each move. Games like GTA or Assassin’s Creed looked amazing when my children played them with the details and the colours and I would have liked to play them as well but I had to watch rather than participate because the physical and mental dexterity I needed to play them was completely lacking. Would that have been different if I had persevered with Pong? Who knows, but it might have helped me in other areas.