Beep-Beep Guys

Brought to you by Atari.

Once upon a time, the Media parents, in one of many great shows of wisdom, purchased an Atari 2600. This video game console, high-tech by the standards of the early 80s, hooked up to the TV and allowed users to play a variety of different games by inserting various cartridges into the slot. The Atari kept my friends and me well occupied after school for several of our early teen years. There was never much need to wonder where we were; just listen for the electronic chirrups and the raucous laughter of a gaggle of adolescents clutching their joysticks.

Our generic term for playing Atari was "beep-beep guys," a name we applied to every game from the very beepy Space Invaders (which we learned to cheat into allowing extra-fast weapons fire) to the less beepy Frogger (maneuver your froggie across the road or river without going splat) to beep-free Poker Plus (I'm pretty good as long as I don't have to bluff or bet) and Maze Craze (at which Sister-san could beat everybody despite being six years younger than us, so it was kind of embarrassing to let her play). We had Pitfall, Combat, Asteroids, Super Breakout (note: does not refer to acne), Arcade Pinball, Blackjack, Circus Atari, Q*bert, Othello, Night Driver, Centipede, 3-D Tic Tac Toe, Air-Sea Battle, Yar's Revenge, Defender, Hangman, Missile Command, Haunted House, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back — and 80s icon Pac Man, of course. There was even one shoot-em-up that allowed four people to play at once, but I forget what it was called. No, wait! Warlords!

Boys played, girls played, and we all got to shoot and drive and hoot and holler in a controlled environment. We set a jar on top of the console TV to collect quarters toward the purchase of more game cartridges. We played endless hours of beep-beep guys vying for position on the lime-green beanbag in my parents' otherwise tasteful living room. Our enthusiasm waned only when more grown-up interests like Trivial Pursuit, play practice, boy- and girlfriends, and driving around town replaced the crude graphics on the screen. I think Mother Media eventually gave the Atari away to a family with younger kids, but what they really wanted by then was a more sophisticated PlayStation.

After this great introduction to video games, I never stopped enjoying them, although my taste did shift from shooting to strategy, and I skipped more than one college class to finish beating a Breakout-like game in the student center (don't tell Mom). When desktop computers made their way into the college newspaper office, I got the entire staff hooked on Tetris and Welltris. When I got a home computer of my own in grad school, I loaded it with Monopoly, puzzle, and word games, a trend I continued until a couple weeks ago.

A couple weeks ago, as you know, I met and fell in love with iRonny, a sleek, white iBook G4. iRonny accepted most of the files I transferred over from the old PC — and is now happily playing my Rockapella webcast, thanks to the generous genius of SuperSixOne — but games formatted for Windows were not welcome in the new Mac neighborhood. Bummer.

But. Last night I was fooling around with iRonny's Dashboard, an application that serves as a sort of desktop junk drawer for little things like a calendar, temperature readout, calculator, flight tracker, etc. The little things are called Widgets. And I learned that you can go online and download zillions of Widgets with which to personalize your iBook, amuse yourself, and goof off to your heart's content.

And guess what. What's old is new again. I found Widget Asteroids and Widget Breakout, two of my old Atari favorites! I can now play low-rez, two-dimensional beep-beep guys on a state-of-the art laptop. And I don't have to wait my turn or try to play while someone jostles me off the beanbag.

I miss that part.

Photos today? NO

Today around the world: September 1 is Ascension of the Prophet in Brunei Darussalam.