Christmas 1982… I was five years old and under the tree at my grandmother’s house there was only one package for Petter. One! This while my older sister could teasingly sit there at the foot of the tree and run her palms over probably seven packages with her name on them. The thoughts floated away and like some of my earliest memories, I remember very well how I wondered if I had been too naughty, too mean. I wasn’t exactly a devil child but certainly not an angel, either. It was part of the routine that I bit my poor grandfather on the legs, a bit sporadically like that. I liked to hit my big sister Anna in the head with various objects and I discovered early on the pleasure of destroying things, of different sizes. Perhaps that single, puny package was the price I would be forced to pay for my early sins?
The truth was different. Quite the opposite, it would turn out. Because in that package that my mother bought and my grandmother paid for, was my very first video game. The start, of everything. On a life as a game geek, on a journey through the promised land of pixels. In the package was a Colecovision plus the games Ladybug, Looping and Frenzy. I remember it pretty much exactly like it was yesterday. How happy I was (not quite “N64 Kid” happy, but pretty close) and how curious I was because on only one occasion before this promised Christmas Eve night had I seen a video game in real life, and that was Pong at my cousin Pär’s . Now I owned a game of my own. With hand controls that looked like a mix between an old telephone and a remote control for a 1978 Blaupunkt TV and with three games.
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Today, when we look back at both Intellivision and Colecovision, it was rubbish, lots and lots of it. The Atari 2600 was clearly less expensive in terms of circuits and performance, but today still feels like the more fun console compared to the Colecon and all the crap games that came out for it, but I didn’t know that – then. I just knew that Ladybug was amazing and that Looping had me spellbound. Basically, it was just a strange game mechanic mixed with lots of bright yellow pixels that made up one of the most difficult flying games of all time, but that was enough, then. It was enough for me to find myself completely hypnotized by what was happening on the screen and what was happening to my purple airplane. Frenzy, on the other hand, I never understood. It was played a lot, but I remember how as a five-year-old I didn’t understand what it was all about and how little I liked when the character you controlled stepped on those electric mines.
One of my kindergarten friends who later became a classmate once elementary school started got a Colecovision about a year after me and his first game was spelled Cabbage Patch Kids and I remember that as the best title for the console, at least of the ones I tried in my younger days and also in later years when, for a period, I started collecting everything Colecovision (including a couple of real rarities). My classmate Richard and I played the Cabbage game until our fingers hurt and Donkey Kong was another game that I had the opportunity to borrow starting in the spring of 1983 and spent a lot of time with. My first console was no NES and certainly no Playstation. It wasn’t very important to the gaming world or something that I look back on today as innovative or particularly good. But it was mine and thanks to my grandmother (whom I miss every day) and thanks to those push-button telephone-like giant controls and a game called Looping, a curiosity, fascination and interest was born that in many ways led me to end up here.
And I feel eternally grateful for that.
Thanks grandma.
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