My Life With Video Games

Written in 1997 by Ter Micharoni

I am 20-something, and have been heavily into video games ever since I was a little boy back in 1979. That year I was on TV PIXX, a primitive video game TV show in New York on channel 11. I played some crude basketball game, and got the highest score of the week. I ended up winning a toy truck and a T-shirt.

After that, we moved onto the golden age of video games in the early 80’s, and I loved every minute of it. Some of my favorites of that time included Asteroids, Dig Dug, Frogger, Donkey Kong, and of course, Millipede, which was probably my personal favorite at the time (I’ll never forget the time when two teenage girls were ahead of me waiting to play, and one said “Let the kid go first, he can’t take long.” I ended up playing for about a half hour. 🙂

From there it was onto the mid 80’s, which saw such arcade classics such as Spy Hunter, Karate Champ, Punch-Out!!, Paperboy, Rampage, and Mat Mania. Those were great games to play. I played Karate Champ all the time in 1984, and became quite good, but never did beat those twin 7th graders. Punch-Out!! was my favorite game of 1985. I was one of the first people I know beat Mr. Sandman and become world champ.

Then the late 80’s were approaching. In January 1987, I got a system which changed my life forever: The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I loved that system as much as anyone can love anything from 1987-1989. It had truly outstanding games such as The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Mega Man, The Goonies II, Double Dribble, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, Trojan, Contra, Rygar, Metal Gear, Baseball Stars, and other that escape my mind for now. I also loved the Sega Master System (SMS) in that same time period. My favorite SMS games were Alex Kidd In Miracle World, Phantasy Star, Fantasy Zone, Wonder Boy, Rambo, Pro Wrestling, The Ninja, Space Harrier, Miracle Warriors, Zillion, and more. I truly had the time of my life with these two systems in that time period.

Then came August 20, 1989, the day I bought a Sega Genesis. The first true 16-bit system in America amazed me. Altered Beast, which came with the system, blew away the SMS version, and came very close to the arcade.

In October of that year, I also bought a NEC Turbo-Grafx 16, the other “next generation” system of 1989. Although the Genesis was superior in graphics and sound, I always liked the Turbo Grafx. Sure, the Genesis had great games like Revenge of Shinobi, Rambo III, Phantasy Star II, and others, but the Turbo Grafx had its share of great games as well, like The Legendary Axe, Blazing Lasers, a great version of Sega’s Fantasy Zone, Dungeon Explorer, R-Type, and for their CD-ROM (the Turbo had the first CD-ROM ever for a home video game system), Ys Book I and II, which probably goes down in history as my favorite game of all-time. Their first CD game was Monster Lair, and I hold the #1 score in the world (or at least the US) in that game. My name and score were in Electronic Gaming Monthly, a very popular video game magazine.

When Knight’s Realm, my BBS (718-667-4014), went up on July 18, 1994, I kinda got out of video gaming a bit, and didn’t even buy close to as many games as I used to. But now that’s it’s down, I’m getting back into the hobby big-time once again, and plan on getting the Sony PlayStation very shortly to go along with my Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn.

10 comments

  1. You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view

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  3. Did anyone catch the State of The Union Speech last night? Don’t know if you feel like I do, but I’m tired of the all the political bullsh_t that these politcians spout. All the grandstanding, just to make themselves look good. I thought that maybe with Republicans gaining the House and the numbers in the Senate much closer that maybe they would have a chance to effect change. But I see that nothing but gridlock and pointing fingers will come of this for the next 2 years. How sad.

  4. The new Nintendo 3DS console is being taken back to stores because it’s making people feel sick when they use it – I thought that was what it was supposed to do LOL! No, being serious for a minute, this is new tech – give it some time, everybody!

  5. Farewell Macho Man Randy Savage, a genuinely great entertainer and one who made the platform that current wrestlers work on. They owe him a debt that they’ll none of them ever be able to repay.

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