I have decided to start a Blog. Not too long ago I thought people who had blogs were idiots. I mean who cares what you have to say and what you think, but then i began to think blogging gets us closer to each other. You may not have to agree with people but its cool to know what people think. And so I have decided to throw my opinions into the ring as it were. My first thought was, "what is it going to be about?" I have decided to have it be about what I am thinking that day. I will try to make it relevevant and not ramble too much. My first topic is going to be a little about me. I think it is important to know who is making these opinions. What was my life like when it comes to games and gaming?

I was born in 1971. My first video game system was the Odyssey 2. To be honest I dont know how that became my first system. I dont remeber asking for it for Christmas but nevertheless in 1978 i owned an Odyssey 2 and I loved it. I remember playing games like UFO!, Killer Bees! K.C. Munchkin! and more. What i liked about the system was that it was only sold at a local Curtis Mathis store and they had a kiosk set up with all the games there that could be played and demoed. I would go in put the cartridge in( they had handles) and play a game and could see if i liked it or not. Looking back i dont think i was too picky, i owned almost every gane that they made. My Mom even loved the system. We had the Odyssey plugged into a TV in the living room; a TV whose only purpose was to play games. She would play the heck out of the golf game and the skiing game. I had a sister who whould play a few titles but she hated sports games( my favorite genre at the time). The problem wasthat most of the sports games were 2 players only, you couldn't play against the computer so i had to event ways were i would play both sides. For example, playing Baseball i would play one team with my right hand and the other with my left. Looking back, it is sad what we had to do to have fun but oh my it was fun.

I grew up in a single parent home. I loved my mom. Every christmas and birthday i would get more games. I was a momma's boy and to be honest i didnt care. Because of that i didnt have too many friends. I had a few but i wasnt the kind of kid who would come home from school and rush to my friends but rather i would stay at home. Now i was aware of other video game systems of the time. There were video game magazines that i would read so I knew of the Atari, Colecovision and Intellivision and sometimes i would see a game i wanted to play but i never knew anyone who had any of those systems and to this day i have never played an Atari. You have to remember this was before the internet, there may have been flame wars with systems but i didnt know and didnt care, I had an Odyssey 2 and I was happy.

Like everone, when you get older you begin to notice other things, things that drag you away from video games; things like sports, movies, books, and girls. I started to notice suddenly that the games for my system were drying up. I began reading magazines about other lesser known systems going out of buisiness. I read about the Odyssey 3 with better graphics though lookijg back on it now, what they were showing were the same Odyssey 2 games but with a layer of better graphics overlayed on top of it. The Odyssey 3 never arrived. The video game market crashed. It was over, Atari, Colecovision, Intellivision, they were all gone. I still played my Odyssey but i missed new games. This was around 1983. Little did i know that a few years later a company from Japan named Nintendo would change video games forever.