mediaRoach

Witchball, or ball tag as some might call it, was a great game to play while growing up. The rules of the game are the same as hide and seek but instead of touching (tagging) the hider with your hand you used a ball that you threw. We always used the ball we played kickball with because it carried pretty well when thrown.

We grew up in a cul-de-sac which made it perfect to play games in the street or games that required us to run through the street. In witchball the seeker always started at the same telephone pole and counted to twenty while the rest of us ran and hid. When the seeker was done counting they would begin to hunt us down and we had to make our way back to the same telephone pole to keep us from being the seeker.

I remember one game where we were playing at dusk and the ground was wet with dew. I came around the corner of our house and came face to face with the seeker. He was a few years older than I was and as he cocked his arm back to throw the ball at me I tried to stop to turn around but I slipped and fell onto my back as I watched the ball sail over me and continue for what seemed like forever. I swear that ball would of taken my head off if I did not slip that night.

Games like witchball are what makes growing up so much fun. It did not take much to play, one ball and at least two people, though we probably had at least eight people per game. Even now I would like to get out there for one last game, anything to hear the sound of kids laughing, screaming and having fun on a hot summer night hoping not to start hearing parents calling us in one by one.

Atari… if you grew up in the seventies you probably had an Atari VCS (later known as the 2600), or maybe an Intellivision. The VCS really started the home video game boom, yes there were a few others before (we had a RCA Studio II first), but it really took off with Atari. Overnight everything changed. Summer days running around, riding bikes, playing witchball, football and other sports started slowing down. We were the first family on our block to get a video game system and that made our house popular with other kids. Soon after other families bought them too and we would play Atari inside our houses with each other. While we still played outside, witchball at night is just the best game ever invented, we did stay inside more. I guess we were the first generation to do that.

I remember when Space Invaders came out in the arcades and then to the VCS, everything changed when we could play the game in our house instead of begging our parents to drive us to the arcade 30 minutes away. Games were good before Space Invaders, I liked Human Cannonball but then there were games like Video Olympics with a million variations on Pong. Of course there was Adventure, still one of my favorite games of all time, it was original and maybe there would not be Zelda without it, but still in the arcade Space Invaders was king and when it came home with great graphics and that pounding score there was no turning back. Space Invaders just might be the first killer app, at least it was to me.

A couple of years after Space Invaders came Pac Man, as big as Space Invaders was Pac Man was even bigger. For the first time women were coming into the arcades to play video games in larger numbers. When the news came out that Atari had the rights for Pac Man we were all excited. I remember when it came in and we hurriedly opened up the box, put the cartridge in the slot and flipped the switch and then we saw the game. What were we looking at? The maze was different, the colors were different. Why was everything flickering? This was not Pac Man. I still played that game and I played it a lot. I soon figured out the pattern of the ghosts and could then play until I grew tired of the game for the day. While it did not look like Pac Man, it did have the essence of the game and that was good enough for me. In fact I was never a big fan of Pac Man in the arcade before or after the VCS version but I did love to play it on our Atari.

Still working, but getting closer

Open my eyes, show me the new way. We blast through our parent’s values searching for our own kind of freedom.