To Whom It May Concern

Let's Play Some 'Pong'!!

When you walk thru an electronics store such as Best Buy nowadays, you will find three main video game systems, Playstation II, Nintendo GameCube, and Microsoft XBox. Then there are the older games, the PSOne, Nintendo 64, Sega, etc. When I started college though, there was only one game system out that was really popular, the 16 bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

Our dorms didn't have cable television, the first year I was there was the first year they even had telephones in the rooms. Those who did bring in televisions with an indoor antennae got one good station, along with 2, sometimes 3 fuzzy stations. If you were really ritzy you had a VCR, about 75% of us did. But even then there were only so many tapes going around to watch. So usually people would end up buying a Nintendo in order to have some other form of entertainment. Because of this, you got to know a lot of people in the dorm, without cable television we would go around room to room and play video games, a LOT.

Because everyone had the same video gaming system, there was always an abundance of games going around. People would usually write their name on the back of the game cartridge in giant black permanent marker, but even that didn't stop the games from disappearing from time to time. Then usually at the end of the year, someone would bring your game back, "sorry, it was under my couch" or something like that, but sometimes you never saw it again.

The biggest game of all when I was in college had to be Super Tecmo Bowl. This was Nintendo's NFL football game, and it was a blast. In a college dorm, having this game meant instantly that your room was going to be party central. You would go around and ask everyone if they wanted to play in a season, and what team they wanted to be, then you would get the season started, the most I ever saw in a season was 16 different people playing. The seasons were set up 16 weeks long, and the games HAD to be played in order. So if it was 4 in the morning and time to play your game, you would either drag your ass out of bed and play, or they would skip you. Same goes for if you had class, the football game had precedence over school, it was much more important.

It was rare that a season of Tecmo would ever make it all the way till the end. First off, the Nintendo was problematic, tending to erase the season for no reason, and it didn't help when people would get pissed off and throw the controllers and such, causing the game to bounce around. Other times, people would just reset the season when no one was around with the hope of doing better next time. Usually only about 5 or 6 people were left entering the playoffs, most often everyone else would quit the season by the time the playoffs rolled around.

The playoffs, though, were a big deal. People would actually schedule times for their playoff games so that everyone could come watch. And wow would emotions run high, people cussing and screaming at one another, even at 3 in the morning, and some real nasty grudges would develop because of the game, one in fact that caused a guy to leave school for a semester (he says that wasn't the reason but nothing else made sense).

A couple of years later though, the other gamings systems sort of took over, and things were never quite the same. I mean, playing Twisted Metal II was awesome and all, but never did we have that bond of friendship with so many people like we did when we were playing Super Tecmo Bowl, or even Tetris and Dr. Mario. With more games and variety it became harder to be good at every game, I suppose that is good in the long run, but people didn't hang out together near as much. That could be because the dorms got cable television too.

Oh well, it was a lot of fun while it lasted, that is for sure, nothing could beat a 3 in the morning football game in your boxer shorts.