The Continuing Saga - The Personal Website of Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith

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Remembering the Games We Play

(l to r) Mom, Cousin Holly, Me, Uncle Larry, and Dad playing Scrabble in 1960. I'm trying to tell Mom that she can spell 'qxrbt' with her letters.

I have always loved playing games. When I was a boy, my father, grandfather, grandmother, and I would sit at an octagonal table and play cards. The table had a special reversible green felt cover and a nice Tiffany hanging lamp over it. We would while away the hours talking while we played Crazy Eights and Gin Rummy. I was fascinated by the march of victory and defeat across that terrible green battlefield. I was always a good looser - mainly because I was more interested in the process of play and the parameters of the game then the final score.

In my adolescence W.T., my godfather, taught me Cribbage and I remain a big fan of the game to this day. I even have two Cribbage boards: one for home and one for work.

It wasn't until my thirties that I really learned how to play Poker intelligently, thanks to my friend Marcus. He also introduced me to the wonders of Fuck Your Neighbor, Follow the Bitch, and Mau Mau. When it comes to games of chance, Marcus' depth of knowledge is unparalleled. I have to wonder how much he's really taught me because my money keeps ending up in his pocket!

After reading the Black Company series by Glen Cook, I became fascinated with a card game called Tonk. I have yet to come face to face with enough people who are aware of the game to actually play it. It has some interesting rules.

Cards are OK and they make a good base for socializing, but what really grabbed me were electronic games. In 1973 my mother owned a bar named the Last Laugh. She had a tired old pinball machine which I had mastered long ago and a shuffleboard table which rated pretty low on my stimulus-response index.

The actual arcade Pong I played on was a first issue Pong arcade cabinet with a prototype MLA Electronics upgrade kit. It had joysticks, but they only moved the paddles up and down.

One day a burly man wheeled in a funny looking box into the bar. It looked like a TV with two small levers and some buttons in front of the screen. He plugged it in, handed Mom the keys to the cashbox, and left. The screen warmed up, displaying two white rectangles on each end of the screen and a small flickering white square that slowly bounced around. About the screen, written in bold yellow letters was the word "PONG".

When Mom wasn't looking I poked around inside the box and was amazed. There were no gears, bells, balls, flippers, chutes, springs, or levers. Everything in the box that made the game work were virtual. In fact, the only moving parts were in the coin return mechanism and the joysticks.

After one weekend I had mastered Pong to the point the regulars at the bar avoided me like the plague. At the tender age of 12 I had fallen in love with and mastered my first video game.

Life's been pretty downhill since then, I guess.

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