Hot Wheels weren’t the only toy from Mattel that made our childhoods awesome!
While I’ve always said that “Drag City Raceway” is about Thunderjet slot cars and 1:64 die-casts, I’ve also maintained that there’s room for other nostalgic vintage toys on this site as well, and here I’m taking another step away from the track to engage with a good local friend of mine who’s passion for vintage video games has recently rekindled my own memories of another toy I greatly enjoyed back in the day.
I’ve never considered my a gamer, but I did have a period of time in my childhood when I enjoyed video games quite a lot. This was during the pinnacle of their popularity when home gaming systems were just becoming versatile enough to bring the arcade experience home. This was the era of “Pac Man Fever” (remember that song? I had the whole album on vinyl, still own it!) and Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre and several similar establishments like it, where families took their kids to nosh on pizza and play video games all night. At the arcade in those days, my favorite game was Frogger…that is, until Pole Position came out, which was about the coolest racing game I’d seen up to that point (and you may remember that both those games had a Saturday morning cartoon tie-in!)
In October of 1981 I moved with my family into the house in Upland CA where I would grow into manhood, and it was here that both myself and my younger brother made friends with other neighborhood kids of our respective age groups and we began hanging out at each other’s houses checking out everyone’s game consoles. At the time, the Atari 2600 was flying off the shelves. For Christmas of that year, my family got our own console, but my dear folks-always eager to make their brood happy-stretched their income and opted for the more expensive competition to the 2600. That year, we got a Mattel Intellivision for X-mas. Every time a household acquired a new game or new game system it was almost a neighborhood event, and we thus became one of the two “Intellivision households” on the block!
For the next couple of years my bro and I were both impossible to tear away from that console; if cartoons weren’t on, the gaming system was, every weekday afterschool until prime-time and every weekend! Some of the best memories I have in my whole life are of those X-mas mornings in the early 80’s opening, learning, and playing a new game with my dad and brother.
As time went on, I began to lose interest in video games, unlike a lot of other kids my age, including some of my friends, who became bigger and bigger gamers into their late teens and early adulthoods. My interest in toy cars never wavered, but by the time I was around 15, I was getting into other things-most notably, real cars, so I wasn’t really tuned in to the next big thing, which, of course, was NES. I left it to my younger brother to pick up that torch, and he did, with the whole system, including the gun and the robot! Sadly, this meant the now outdated Intellivision fell by the wayside. I have no idea what became of the console itself; probably garage-saled or thrown away…just like my Matchbox Speedtrack.
So fast forward to today, living in a place I may have been hard-pressed to point out on a map back in 1981. My buddy Jason is about 5 years younger than I, so that’s close enough for us to have had a lot of shared experiences. Jason is a gamer and in particular has an affinity for the Legend of Zelda. So recently while hanging out with Jason at his house in Parker, he brought out a couple of his own toys I found pretty amusing; these included miniaturized reproductions of the Intellivision, Atari 2600, and NES consoles with full-sized controllers that mimic the originals quite accurately, as well as a newer console to which he had downloaded the ROMs of several additional games from the era. We spent a night in his room playing several of these games, and it was just like being a kid again: going over to a friend’s house and sitting “Indian-style” (oh, I bet that’s “problematic” now, right?) in front of the TV for hours holding wired controllers and playing Joust, Zelda, the Duck Tales video game (a game version of one of my favorite cartoons from my late teens) and several others. It was a blast!
One of the most interesting things he showed me was a new game (well, 2019: that’s “new” to me!) called “Micro Mages,” created by an outfit called Morphcat Games, which (as I understand it, correct if I’m wrong, dear readers) is a couple of developers based in Berlin who are in love with the classic 8-bit games guys my age knew in our childhoods. While I don’t know anything about them, I’m assuming they’re a lot younger than me, but regardless, they’re impressive developers, because they’re one of a handful of dev outfits on a mission to create new games for the NES and some of the other classic consoles. Micro Mages was a blast to play!
This impromptu weeknight hang-out was one of the most fun nights I’ve had in a while; so much so that it caught me off guard, and I expect the two of us will be getting together again soon for another such night! Sure, our lives are eaten up by “the adult stuff,” but there’s still a few hours in the day for a couple of old codgers like us to play like when we were kids. Don’t ever lose that wonder, dear readers: just like HO slot cars, the best vintage toys are just as fun today as you remember them being back then!
Sounds like a fun night for sure. We had the Atari when I was a kid and my sister and I played it. I never got into it as much as my contemporaries but it was fun. I remember liking Asteroids and Space invaders but Pole Position was the one for sure!