It's hard to believe I am noting the milestone of having played video games for 30 years. Ever since I dropped those first quarters into a Space Invaders video game at the Union Building on my college campus I was hooked. Remember, this was before the NES game system came out. This was before everyone had a computer at home. This was before Microsoft. In fact, the only computer I had ever seen was for a college class on programming. My, how things have changed. My friend and I would go downtown to the local video game arcade and drop $20 worth of quarters, which was a fair amount of money back in 1980 for a college student, and play until 3:00 am. OH, and what a time we had. There was nothing like the sounds of a hundred arcade games making their noises, drawing you in, and hanging on to your quarters like they were gold. It was mesmerizing. Sometimes we'd play against each other (Crazy Climber, Defender) and sometimes we'd play together (Gauntlet). Sometimes, to stretch our coin and stay there longer we'd watch the other one play and just enjoy the game. I laugh when I think about the Track & Field game with the roller ball the size of a pomegranate that you had to spin. We would be hunched over spinning that ball as if our lives depended on it, working up a sweat in the process, hurling our athlete down the track. I remember the early days of NES. There were no save features on those games. I will never forget playing Adventure Island and getting to level 22 and putting the game on pause so I could come back later to pick up where I left off only to have a power interruption make me start all over. I wish now I had never traded in my NES system and all my games but hey, there were bigger and better games to be had and I had to have them. Though I rarely play console games now they are still a bright spot in my video game legacy. And every now and again, I will hook up with my old college buddy, and we will go back into time and play them all over again.