Those of you who know me know that I probably know more useless music trivia than any sane human should know. While most people were learning relative’s birthdays and anniversaries, I was reading album liner notes. So I could probably tell you Ace Frehley's guitar tech before I could tell you my mother's birthday. But enough about that. What I am here to blog about is one of the earliest, if not the earliest marriage of rock music and video games. The band Journey was on top of the world in 1983 when Bally Midway decided to capitalize on the bands upcoming U.S. tour and released the Journey video game.
So what you say. This game was really ahead of its time. It had scanned images of the band member’s faces on cartoon bodies trying to retrieve their instruments on different planets. Once you obtained all of the instruments it played their hit song “Separate Ways”. The song was looped on a cassette player inside the machine. Due to the degradation of the cassette tape finding one of these machines that still works is nearly impossible. So you won’t be able to put on your parachute pants and Rising Sun T-shirt and push some quarters into this innovative machine.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
A New Perspective
Since the 1st Globaloria training in June, I have looked at video games in a new light. Until then I had never really cared about what was going on behind the scenes to make these games work. After the June training, whenever I play them now I am thinking in the back of my mind “How did they do this” or “How did they do that”. Recently, I had a flashback. I went into Pizza Hut to pick up some pizzas for my daughter’s birthday party and there before mewas a Donkey Kong machine! This took me right back to 1982.Until I had to put 50 cents in to play.
I will confess, growing up I was a video game junkie. I would pump quarter after quarter into these machines. It started with pinball and evolved to Pac Man, Centipede right on until home platforms got affordable. But seeing this Donkey Kong machine got me thinking. Thinking back to that training in June and how we had a created a game that was comparable in a few hours and how Donkey Kong was state of the art in 1982.
On the ride home I got to thinking about the advances in technology in just the last 20 years. In my adult life I have evolved through Pong, Atari, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Playstations 1 -3, Play station Portable, Nintendo DS. I never would have dreamed that I would have all of this technology in my life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
