The gods have been forgotten
Soon I will be the old man on my porch shouting “Get off my lawn!”
Yesterday, I visited my barber for a monthly cut. It’s called the Stepping Razor and has a kind of biker punk/rockabilly vibe. Posters of tattoos and old 70s biker films on the wall. A song came on over the speakers, a stereo made out of an old suitcase. I didn’t recognize the song but the barbers did.
“This is on the Tony Hawk* soundtrack,” one of the barbers said.
“Yeah, I used to play that game a lot,” my barber replied.
I added, “Yeah, I used to play Skate or Die on my old C64 all day.”
“C64?” the barber said.
“Yeah,” I said. “the Commodore 64?”
He gave me a dumbfounded look.
“It was like the old Atari 2600, but with a keyboard and more memory.”
Still another dumbfounded look. “Dude, man,” I said, eyes wide. “You’ve never heard of the Atari 2600?”
“Dude, man,” he said, smiling. “I just got a ‘Dude, man.'”
And that’s when I started to feel old.
The Atari 2600 was, for me, the epiphany of happiness. One of the first mass-produced gaming consoles, I wanted one more than air. But my father, thinking (perhaps correctly) that there was little educational value in an Atari 2600 got me a TRS-80 instead. The games weren’t as cool, but I did get to learn how to program on it, and I used the tape recorder attachment to record my programs onto audio cassettes. I used to play them back on my bedroom tape recorder just to hear the digital sounds. To me it was wondrous that these sounds could translate into words, letters and numbers. Later, my cousin gave me his Commodore 64, a machine with much more memory and processor speed than the slogging old TRS-80, and off I went again into video game land, this time hacking the programs to make them do silly things.
All hail the Commodore
I assumed everyone knew of Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t. It’s like saying you are into rock and roll but have never heard of Zeppelin or the Beatles. What blasphemy is this?
But it’s not blasphemy, it’s just me, getting older. And if you are one of the lucky ones who are young enough not to remember the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, heed this warning: one day some person who you think is not too much younger than you will say “What’s a smartphone?” and you will suddenly feel old.
* Tony Hawk was a famous skateboarder, and a god-like figure when I was a teenager.
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