“Shake it like a Polaroid picture.”
Before “Hey Ya!”, that was part of what competitive video gaming was to me: a Polaroid snap of my high score on the TV screen; shaking that film as I ran thru the neighborhood to share my feat with friends; shouting “Beat this!” as I held out the now fully developed screenshot. The Polaroid was proof and was the most readily available (only?) method to record gaming accomplishments for a console connected to a television via a converter screwed to the UHF antenna contacts.
Maybe that’s not perfectly true. While the console was connected via the antenna inputs, its output was first routed through a VHS tape recorder, which hooked into the antenna and allowed the television to serve as the gaming display. Crude, but effective in allowing solo Pitfall runs or Astrosmash sessions as well as head-to-head baseball and football games to be recorded and played repeatedly.
These were my first watch parties, gathering around and pressing play on a freshly rewound videotape.
Of course, solo feats or temporary bragging rights needed to be elevated and memorialized amongst the neighborhood competitors: Console Olympics with a rotation through different “host houses” and games on the platform that kid’s parents bought for them.
Ruled notebooks kept schedules, tables, and points rankings and logged all the stats generated over multiple game titles. Medal counts were tracked and analysis was performed on the accumulated data. The notebook margins may have even noted friendly betting between match competitors or observers, with typical wagers of chores, baseball cards, dares, and candy stashes.
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As a high school teacher, one friend’s father was able to borrow an early Apple computer for the weekends. Playing Castle Wolfenstein off a 5.25″ floppy on a monochrome screen with just keyboard controls was massive but I found more enjoyment in dipping into programming to craft long text games and math-based mortar-launching ones (parabolas!).
Written in BASIC, I would fill a notebook with lines of code during the week — plenty of GOTO and IF/THEN statements — and then transcribe the pages into the Apple with my hunt-and-peck typing method.
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Complementing the “console wars” and coding, were hours spent rolling dice during Strat-O-Matic baseball or Dungeon & Dragons sessions. Here too I kept meticulous notebooks of stats for each simulated game — I played out a full 162-game schedule — and drew detailed maps & labyrinths that I knew would thrill my fellow D&D participants.
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From Polaroids and notebooks of rankings; streaming replays and simulating stick-and-ball; manually tracking stats and spawning stories; to what computing power and technologies have enabled, facilitated, or automated today: Let’s keep shaking it up.