PS.......................

Justin,
Actually my friends and I were probably arguing if it was possible that anything could ever be better than Acapulco Gold….at the time. The original Pong arcade game was pretty lame. Didn’t come close to matching the excitement of almost any of the electro-mechanical arcade games of the time. (and it looked and felt electro-mechanical.) So Pong didn’t jar any future possibilities at all.

Another reason to overlook Pong as a precursor was the fact it was an arcade game. Refrigerator sized games were rarely thought of as a possible home entertainment.

Having said that….As I look back I do remember having as a kid, two of the attempts to change that.. A table top shooting arcade and a table top pinball machine. Both were actually quite good..nearly arcade quality..but they DID take up a table top, so the idea of a closest full of them was definitely out of the question!

But looking back a little less far…..the real seed for computer gaming back in the 70’s may very well have been what was to be the golden age of …board games. (If not in sales certainly in innovations.)

Someone….probably at Milton Bradley, realized that there was an almost totally untapped market in Baby Boomers. Record sales were sky rocketing, but there was little else to entertain them with (legally.)

So Board Game manufacturers started coming out with all manner of games aimed at an adult market. It was the origin of the plethora of military/civilization campaign games that are the top sellers of today….

Personally I always thought helmeted 3D virtual reality was going to be THE Holy Grail of gaming…still do…beyond that…the person that can imagine it…will own it!