From Pong to Kong to…..

I remember sitting in my grandmother’s house when I was a little kid playing my uncle’s pong video game. If you don’t remember pong, it was a basic video game in which you would move this bar like object up and down the screen to block this white square dot from passing you. It was a type of tennis game with no characters on the screen, just a white dot. It was a very basic but fun game to play. It had you thinking to yourself, “Wow, what will they think of next?”


Well I am not going to give a history lesson on what video games came out after Pong but, in my opinion, think the single game that really started it all was “Donkey Kong!!!!” Yes that’s right, in 1981 this game featured a giant ape (Donkey Kong) and this little Italian plumber named Mario, two of video gaming’s most popular characters. Even though Mario was this little man who had to jump over barrels and fireballs as well as other obstacles to rescue his girlfriend named Lady (who was captured by Donkey Kong), he later became the biggest name in the video industry. There were other video games that may have shared popularity votes such as Pac-Man and a few others but Mario’s character had numerous amounts of spinoff games to date. Playing Mario Brothers back in the day made you feel that that time was just the beginning of video gaming.

As a kid I played all the systems. I didn’t own them all but I played them all. Every time we played a new system we felt the gaming couldn’t get better. The graphics and game play went from 2D stick figures to 3D life like characters. The controllers to operate the video games went from a box with a knob to a joystick with one button to, what we have now which are these spaced out controllers with about two hundred buttons on them that controls every move your character makes including making their eyes blink (exaggeration here). With technological advancements today you can play video games with people through the Internet. You don’t even need to be sitting next to them during game play. The Tiger Woods 2010 golf game has this on-line feature that allows you to play the video game in the current weather conditions as the pros are playing in at the exact time they are playing the real tournament, for example, if it is raining at Bethpage Black golf course during the US Open while Tiger is teeing off then you are playing in the rain in your living room. When I saw this on-line option I realized that this in fact, is the beginning of video gaming.