{"id":1607,"date":"2012-11-04T22:09:03","date_gmt":"2012-11-04T22:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=1607"},"modified":"2012-11-05T12:33:40","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T12:33:40","slug":"my-top-100-54-berzerk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=1607","title":{"rendered":"My Top 100: #54 – Berzerk"},"content":{"rendered":"
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1980 – Stern Electronics (Arcades, Atari 2600, Atari 2800, GCE Vectrex)<\/p><\/div>\n

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This is guaranteed to be the oldest game on my list, bar none.\u00a0 There’s only one “first”, however, and Berzerk <\/em>is\u00a0the first video game I ever played.<\/p>\n

Through your years of being, you know, a person who does things and goes places…\u00a0 have you ever gone to people’s houses and thought “This\u00a0house is laid out all weird.\u00a0 It’s nothing like my house\\my grandparent’s house\\my friend’s house, and it’s all decorated differently.\u00a0 What’s up with that?”<\/p>\n

If you don’t know what I mean, then you’ll just have to humour me.<\/p>\n

We had family friends in the Baie that had a bungalow.\u00a0 I guess that’s the kind where everything is on one level…\u00a0 anyway, they lived across the street from a gas station they owned, and the glow from the Petro-Canada sign would always shine red and white into their living room.\u00a0 The kitchen, the TV room, the carpet, and every piece of\u00a0furniture\u00a0in the house was either brown or beige.\u00a0 The house had a 70’s vibe to it, which I found kinda weird at the time.<\/p>\n

The couple had a son about five years older than I was, and he had some pretty cool toys.\u00a0 He thought it’d be cool if I played his Vectrex, a\u00a0tiny television with a controller hooked up to it with (what looked like) a\u00a0coiled-up\u00a0telephone cord.\u00a0 I had never played a video game\u00a0before, but it couldn’t be that tough.<\/p>\n

I grabbed that brick of a controller, and I’ve been on a path of button-mashing ever since.<\/p>\n

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