First of all, gamers tend to measure our age by our first video game. The true OGs say Pong, but I'm not that old, I am precisely as old as Mario and Donkey Kong, but they weren't my first video game, that was Frogger. Oh yeah, my dad got an Atari 400, which was just a keyboard and two joysticks and one cartridge for Frogger, all connected to a black and white TV. My dad eventually got some other games, Hookey(Q-bert with bad graphics), Round-Up(a game where you herd horses with a helicopter, the challenge being that you need the gate open to get horses in, but when the gate is open horses you herded in can also get out) and a couple Sesame Street games. Now before you pick on me about Sesame Street, let me make this clear, I got started at age 3, Sesame Street was da bomb. I learned my shapes from Ernie's magic show and learned patterns from Big Bird and little bird at the market. But of these, Frogger was my game. Then came Nintendo. Everybody else got the package with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt and the laser gun. I got the cheap package with no game and my parents got Donkey Kong Classics as my first game on Nintendo. Every weekend I got to rent another game from the store and played the hell out of it. I pretty much never beat a game, and not just because of time, but because there was no saving back then. It was all or nothing, you finished the game in one sitting or you lost. Some games did save, many with passwords, leading to the original cheat, enter the password that gets you to the last level with maximum lives and all weapons, items, power-ups, skills, abilities, etc. Then came Dragon Warrior, my first RPG. I've already talked about this in my first ever post, but you need to understand how hard this was. Rpg video games were reknowned for being non-linear, as if that's a good thing. Sorry, but I started with getting my frog across the street, getting Mario up the construction site, and getting Mario from the left to the right to save the princess from the turtle. Giving me a game in my single digit years and telling me I can go anywhere was too much freedom, I jst didn't know what the point was. Dragon Warrior has one goal, to defeat the DragonLord, which they state at the very beginning of the game. They also hint that you have to save the princess from another dragon and collect armor from your ancestor which along with the Golem of Cantlin makes for three mini-bosses ont he way to the final boss. It was short and simple in theory, in practice it was bashing a lot of slimes while you level up. And you didn't have a party, you were obligate solo in this game so you had to fight and heal. The worst part was you only had one save point, so you had to haul ass all the way back to the King at the beginning to save every frickin' time. The one high point is there are two endings, the good ending where you defeat the Dragon Lord, and the badass ending: when you face the dragon Lord he asks you if you will join him, and you can actually say yes. If you say yes he asks if you're sure, and this is very important, because if you say yes again, he says something like "So be it! Muwahaha!" And then the screen goes dark and you realize you've become the villain's right hand man. Then came Final Fantasy, which was actually somewhat linear, but still had some save issues(you had to stay at an inn or use a tent/cabin/house every time you saved) but it did let you have a party to specialize purposes, and it had a unique interface that allowed you to watch your characters fight the monsters. It really changed RPGs for Nintendo. Then came the great mistranslation of imported games controversy that wouldn't be exposed until Sony took over the FF franchise for Playstation. Nintendo, like so many other companies that imported foreign stuff aimed at kids, didn't think we'd care if they fudged a few details, like replacing Super Mario Bros. 2 with an unrelated game, or editing Dragon Ball beyond recognition. But the biggest of all was FF, which actually had three games for the original NES, but we only saw one. Apparently the process took too long and when Super Nintendo came out they jumped to FFIV and renamed it FFII to keep numbering straight in America.Then they skipped FFV because they thought it was too complicated(Not true in my opinion) and went on to FFVI as FFIII. Then came FFVII and a new company who decided not to worry about nintendo's numbering system and just stuck with the original name, leaving Americans to wonder what we missed. The error has since been corrected but those were hard times for us gamers back then.
However, video games were not the only form of entertainment to undergo a revolution in my youth. I remember the beginning of Cable TV. Now we have thousands of channels, I had fifty, and that counted premium channels, which I didn't actually have, except when Disney did a free preview. Yes, Disney Channel used to be a premium channel, I don't know why, the only show worth remembering was the Mickey Mouse Club. Long ago, TV really only had five real channels, the big three CBS, NBC, and ABC, PBS, and Fox, which was back then what the CW is now, a wannabe. These were all distributed between local affiliates within the first thirteen channels, and if you did not have cable, those were the only channels that existed. We had cable on two televisons, though we had a third that didn't get cable at all. The main TV was cable ready so we put our cable box with the secondary TV. Now kids, the reality is your main TV is actually on channel 3, which is reserved for cable boxes and video games. It was true then and it's true now, you change your channel through the box. Our cable box was a slide dial that only went up to channel 50 because there wasn't anything past that, so there was no need to have access to those non-existent numbers. Channel 1 is actually for radio, so nobody has that, we didn't really have channel 2 either, and channel 4 was...I can't remember. Channel 5 was WGN, a local channel from Chicago that was apparently worth national attention. Channel 6, on cable was TBS, which was distinct for running 5 minutes later than every other channel, primarily to keep people from changing the channel because you'd either miss the end of the TBS show or the beginning of whatever you changed to, it was a pain. Then came the big five with a couple local cable access channels. I don't know if these still exist, but they are such crap, even then it was a joke and it still would be if anyone had time to pay attention to whether they exist at all. After channel 13, I can't really remember what came in the teens, but I think one of them was TLC, formerly The Learning Channel. TLC used to be filled with educational shows for children in the morning and insightful documentaries and other highbrow material for the rest of the day, it is one of the saddest statements on the collapse of society that this channel is now known for "Here comes Honey Boo-Boo". Moving along, getting into the twenties we had channels that actually had a grasp of how to use cable, CNN, the original 24 hour news network, ESPN and the Weather Channel(23), which used to simply be an 8-bit digital weather map that cycled through weather reports with jazz music playing in the background, it was boring but it served it's purpose. Then there was TNN(27), MTV(28) and VH1(29) at the end of the twenties, and back then, MTV actually showed music videos. Oh it was so pure and simple, pop, rock and rap musicians would make videos to go with their songs and they would just play all day, and that was all there was to it. It was beautiful, and then we got "The Real World", which quickly spawned enough reality series that they actually made MTV2 to air the videos that would now longer air on MTV, until reality took over MTV2 leading to a third channel...at what point are they just going to remove the M and admit they sold out and gave up on music altogether? VH1 was aimed at the parents of the MTV generation, and one of the things that makes me feel rally old is realizing I have aged out of MTV into VH1, and so has everyone else which is why the only videos are on the Top 20. Sorry, I just had to stop and cry. Okay, so that leaves the last ten channels, because my dial actually went to static after channel 41. Here we had Nickelodeon, USA, TNT, Lifetime, A&E, Discovery, Comedy Central, Family Channel, the Travel Channel and the spanish channel Telemundo. Travel Channel has not changed a whole lot, their quality has improved, but they have probably stayed the most true to what they originally intended of all these channels along with Discovery which unlike TLC is still educational. The same can not be said of A&E which once showed such artsy stuff that it was quite literally the television equivalent of going to the museum of modern art, looking at some avant garde piece and just saying "what the hell?" but at least it was culture, and now it's "Duck Dynasty". Comedy Central pretty much just reused censored clips from HBO stand-up comdey shows and replayed them the same way MTV played music videos(for those of you who still don't get it, MTV used to be like Vevo on Youtube, when Vevo becomes all about reality, it's time to riot, we will not, we can not, let that happen again). The other channels, honestly, just ran various reruns from the real networks. Admittedly, by this time, there was enough of those reruns to fill 24 hours on five channels, but it took years for them to come up with anything worth watching unless you weren't alive for the first time Kung Fu aired. But Nickolodeon was definitely the one that I owe a lot to. They filled their airtime with imported programming, primarily "You Can't Do That On Television" form Canada which introduced the green slime which I understand is still their trademark to this day. f course my fans know when I speak of imported television, I'm talking about anime. My firsts were "The Little Prince" "Belle and Sebastian" and "Mysterious Cities of Gold". That was quality programming dammit! I was just a kid and they sucked me in hard, and I never really let go, Adult Swim is just enabling my addiction, and the vast supply available on the net and local conventions caused me to cave and admit, I am a lifelong otaku, I was born this way and I may even ahve a buddhist/shinto funeral, Kami help me. One more thing I have to mention about the good old days is the greatest thing ever to exist in the entire history of youth entertainment...SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS! Kids today are spoiled with Cartoon Network(yes I am older than Cartoon Network, and I remember when it started, I was at least in middle school by then) but back then cartoons were a special for Saturday, from 8AM to Noon, the major networks fought for the attention of kids starting their two days of freedom from school with the most incredible collection of overcommercialized toy advertising animated nonsense(I still lose sleep contemplating the irony of how many plastic Captain Planet action figures are in landfills right now) and I lived for it along with every other kid in America. It's hard to pin down which was the most awesome, Pirates of Dark Water definitely had the best story, damn ABC for cancelling it, Captain N defintitely appealed to the gamer in me, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles clearly has the staying power. I am so not ashamed to admit that my hero was Michelangelo and I wanted to be him when I grew up. My nieces watch the reboot on Nickelodeon and I asked the older one, "Which one is your favorite?" and her answer was "Michelangelo." I wanted to cry I was so proud of her. Going back to Captain N, this was a serious testament to how much video games and cartoons crossed over, the show was about a teenage boy who played video games so much that he was actually transported through his televison set into the Nintendo Universe where he fought Mother Brain from Metroid, King Hippo from Punch-Out! and the Eggplant Wizard from Kid Icarus alongside Mega Man, Simon Belmont form Castlevania and Kid Icarus himself, using the power of a gamepad that could pause the world and move things around, and his laser gun, clearly the peripheral used with games like Duck Hunt. I think the fact that this show even existed says alot, the fact that it ran for more than one season says even more. The most can be said that if I couldn't be Michelangelo, I wanted to be Captain N, I would actually hope my game would suck me in while I was playing, tragically it never did:( I now leave you with three of the greatest Saturday Morning Cartoon intros so that you may decide the best for yourself. And for the record, regardless of what anyone else says, what I show below is the REAL TMNT(I'm talking to you Michael Bay).
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