Playing games during Public School hours.

It was the mid 1980's and my exposure to personal computers was limited to seeing them in stores, in the pages of magazines or watching Bill Cosby and Captain Kirk advertisements on TV. Our house was very absent of one, since they were considered to be an unnecessary expense.

The very first time I laid eyes on one, in real life and being used by a living, breathing person, was in my final years in elementary school. The details I do remember was this, it was a dimly lit hallway, it was called a Circle ][ and it was on an enormous brown wheeled cart. I also remember thinking, at the time, the girl who was around the same age I was, sitting on a orange plastic and metal chair, tapping away at the keyboard, was cute.

When I saw what was on the screen in front of her, my attention was quickly and easily diverted. In the middle of the monitor was this face, made up of simple while lines, of an old man with bushy eyebrows, a beard and mustache and funky hair. An electronic looking Albert Einstein, constructed out of vector graphics.

Curious, I asked her what she was doing. Her reply was that she was playing this game. She typed in some question and sat back, crossing her arms with a grin. The face on the screen was moving, the eyebrows were wiggling and the beard was twitching. I squinted and leaned in to read the small print at the bottom of the screen, the final result of this whole dramatic process.

Not knowing what her question to the machine was, I feigned partial surprise with reading the answer it produced. I was, however, truly surprised with what I was a witness to. I stepped back and continued to watch, while she leaned in closer to the keyboard and typed something in. Once again,  the face had convulsions and posted a reply on the screen. Over and over this happened and I stood there, captivated by what was going on, until the bell rang.

My recess was over and it was time for me to go back to class. I asked her if she had to go too, but her response was no. She told me she was allowed to remain in the hallway with the computer. I remember at the time, wishing I could have got that kind of permission. I smiled at her as I walked away and all of it faded to a mere memory.

I have long since forgotten the name of the game or if I even asked for it. I never had the opportunity to try it, for myself, then or even now. I also never did see that girl again and know nothing about her, not even her name. I hope her life has turned out well, getting everything she ever wanted, needed and blessed with happiness. I doubt she would remember me.

It would be just a short matter of time before I would have a chance to be sitting in front of a keyboard of my very own, no questions asked.

It all started with this machine.

It was the spring of 1983. In the busier part of the world, IBM launched the Personal Computer XT, Micheal Jackson introduced the "moonwalk", and the Space Shuttle Challenger took off for the first time. In my part of the globe, the snow was just starting to melt and the weather was getting warmer.

For some odd reason, my mother had decided to pick a video game system for the house, but at the time, I didn't know it. Why she didn't go with either an Atari 2600, Intellivision or ColecoVision wasn't immediately obvious to me then (of course, now I know that it was so she could watch our one and only TV and not have it tied up with me playing games).

I can remember the transit bus ride from where it picked us up, at a bus stop near our house, all the way to the mall. I think K-Mart was having a sale, since my mother had a flyer to that particular store held in a death grip the entire way there.

Once we stepped off the bus, we walked through the main entrance and proceeded down the main arcade/promenade towards our pre-selected destination. She just happened to know exactly where in the store to go and once we arrived, I figured out very quickly what was going on.

The big, heavy, grey box announced its contents. Seeing the picture of the black machine hiding inside started my outpouring of excitement. I can't remember everything she said or asked the clerk, who just happened to be standing there, but I do remember very clearly pushing the shopping cart, with its lone occupant, towards a cashier as my mother led the way.

She opened her purse, took out a wallet and started to thumb through bills of coloured money. There was no Interac and only rich folks had credit cards. She collected a receipt and the cashier put a long store sticker on the box - it was much too large to be bagged - proving to any onlookers it was, indeed, paid for.

We went back the way we first came, pushing the cart; I was staring at the picture on the box of its contents. I couldn't wait to get this home and try it out. Out the mall we went and sat at a bench beside the bus stop; the cart never left my sight. When the transit bus came, it took both of us to pick the box out of the cart and onto the bus. With my mother on one side, me on the other, the box sat in the middle.

Near our house, the two of us carried the loaded box down the short bus steps, touched ground and slowly paced home. Once inside, my excitement was starting to overtake common sense and good manners. The box was partly opened, my mother calmed me by putting one hand up in the air, while reading the instructions for the machine, which were held in her other hand.

Finally, I was allowed to pull out the Styrofoam packing and I pulled the electronic marvel from its prison. Finding the cord, I plugged it into the wall outlet and my mother turned a knob, powering it on. As I came from around back to face the monitor, she slipped in a thin plastic screen, saying Mine Storm at the bottom. Our first game was built in, no cartridge was needed.

Vectrex

GCE

Entertaing

New Ideas

Through a blue layer I read those words like I had just discovered the Holy Grail. My mother placed the stowaway control panel into my hands; joystick to the left, four buttons to the right. I was so ready for this. Or was I?

I watched, in awe, as a vectored ship made out of sticks of light dropped down my screen, depositing little dots as it went. My ship appeared in the middle of the screen, looking very much like a winged missile, made of the same kind of sticks. Then the enemies flashed into existence. Big triangular shaped objects started to float around. I wiggled the joystick and tapped a button. My mighty weapons were dots coming from the nose of my ship. I destroyed one of the enemies, only to have two slightly smaller ones appear, to replace it. I tapped another button and teleported right into another enemy. My ship broke apart into four pieces.

Once again, that vectored ship dropped down the screen and I learned to turn, shoot, thrust and teleport, harassing the enemies and killing a few along the way. My first sit-down was for a few hours, but over many years to come it would stretch out much longer.

Along the way, more games were added to the library - such titles as Clean Sweep, Scramble and Web Wars, to name a few. However, as time went on, games were becoming harder to find on store shelves. Even the machines themselves stopped being available for purchase. It seemed as fast as Vectrex hit the market, it vanished just the same.

That old, one and only machine is still around, now in the hands of my much younger brother. While I moved on to other gaming consoles over time, my mother played the Vectrex occasionally, right up to her passing, now over ten years ago. To this day, my brother claims it still powers up and plays just fine.

Funny thing, though - I still see that vectored ship, dropping dots when it falls, from time to time.