December 25th 1976. It was an overcast and very rainy day in Oceanside California. In the 70's it was common for a deluge of rainstorms to hit Southern California during the winter months and this year was no exception.

This Christmas, however, was not cause for great celebration for Daemon. During the waning months of every year he was routinely struck down with strange & violent variations of Strep Throat and this year the illness decided to visit him on Christmas Day. Try though he might to make it to the living room to enjoy in the festivities, alas his illness was too great and the waves of nausea too powerful and so he just laid there and drifted in and out of sleep.

As consciousness became something more familiar to Daemon, he began to take in some fluids and watch whatever daytime Christmas specials that were dancing upon the television set. Carefully his parents weighed his newfound condition of lucidity and tiptoed in a very large box festooned with the usual holiday trappings. Daemon's feeble hands slowly tore the images of happy snowmen away from the trapped box which had the words "Electronic Video Game" printed upon its exterior. Ladies and gentlemen I present to you the first video game console I owned...

:shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock:

The Hanimex 7771

Truly an epic moment in my life although at the moment I was oh so very sick and at 12 years old one doesn't tend to sit back and view things in their proper historical context. All I cared about was that I was sick as hell but I got to play pong in my bed! What sort of exciting games did this console have on it? Let's look...

Pong "Tennis" ~ It's the original that it still spoken about in hushed and reverent tones to this day! You versus the computer or you could take on an opponent like your scruffy brother who has no appreciation for the proper ownership of anything in your room. You will take him down like the fake twin your mother dressed him up to be. Sorry...(inner dialogue daemon).

Pong"Hockey" ~ Um...okay. This was a rather difficult game. You and your opponent both control two bars with your paddles at the same time. The bars closest to the middle are the "attackers" and the bars guarding the the goal gaps on the far sides are appropriately enough called "defenders". You controlled the defender on your side and the attacker on your opponent's side. Sounds easy right? Well it wasn't.

By the by, you may notice that the machine pictured has a setting for Football and no mention of Hockey. That's because the best pictures I could find of my long lost system are the British and Australian version which had the "hockey" option presented as "football" or "soccer" as it's known in the states and "futbol" as it's known in Southern California. You kids in the States remember soccer right? That's the sport that for 40 years they've been telling us is getting more and more popular in the U.S. but it never does? I thought so.

Pong "Squash" ~ Another odd cookie that was actually very hard due to the, at times, incredible speed at which the ball moved. I had fun confuddling my opponents ability to distinguish between his paddle and mine by randomly flicking my dial so fast that it made the paddle images bleed together. Oh what a young scamp I was!:P But I was out to win at all costs!:x

What?! I'm sorry but the word squash suddenly makes me think of a most excellent Squash player from Britain that goes by the name of Vicky Botwright. What?!:evil: She's really a good player and an excellent athlete and she keeps herself very fit and well...:oops: Let's move on shall we?

Pong "Squash Practice" ~ All right, I'm not going to lie to you. No matter how bored we were in the 70's NOBODY played this game. If it came down to this game and digging holes in the ground so that my Hot Wheels had cool tunnels to travel through then rest assured I would be out there on my hands and knees getting all dirty like little boys are want to do.

Why this trip down memory lane? Well up until two days ago I never knew what my pong system was. I vividly remembered what it looked like but it was a fairly plain no-name model and most pong sites just have walls of text of all the various machines that were floating around in the 70's. Up until now, whenever anybody asked me what my first home console was all I had was a small fuzzy picture of the system in a group shot of various pong machines.

By pure chance I stumbled across an old computer system site that had walls of text accompanied by small pictures! Let me tell you the excitement and hope I held out as my tremulous hands spun on the mouse dial was something to be seen. At long last, my quest had ended and the kingdom could sleep in peace once more.

First consoles anyone?