Category Archives: 70’s

Conan O’Brien Takes On Retro Games

These days, mountainous-haired carrot-top Conan O’Brien seems to be taking a lead from Jimmy Fallon, who replaced O’Brien on NBC’s Late Night back in 2009. Conan went on to host the vaunted late night talk show The Tonight Show, a run that only lasted months. Fallon himself has since been tasked to take over The Tonight Show when current host Jay Leno steps down, perhaps even permanently this time.

Anyway, this post isn’t meant to dwell on the revolving-door morass that is late night television in America. It is meant to point out that O’Brien himself has started to mine video games for comedic value, much like Fallon has pretty much from day one. Fallon played Wii games on his show when Nintendo’s revolutionary console came out, and has featured other popular games in front of the camera.

This focus on video game playing by late night hosts seems on the whole to be tapping the popularity of “Let’s Play” videos of game play that litter YouTube and twitch.tv these days. Germain to this site, O’Brien featured a “Throwback Edition” of his Clueless Gamer segment last week, playing games from the Atari 2600 library. Among the savaged product was the big kahuna of awful classic games, the impenetrable E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, a game so dense and confusing, and with such high-hopes pinned upon it at release in 1982, that its abject failure was one of the reasons the entire video game industry cratered in 1983-84.

Gaze upon the spectacle of Conan O’Brien sampling the best (and worst) games from one of the most popular video game systems of all time:

Showdown In the Arcade

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I was refining my article on the beginnings of Nintendo and the development of their smash hit Donkey Kong, and came across this, an image of Wild Gunman. Made in 1974 by famed Nintendo hardware guru Gunpei Yokoi, I actually remember playing this game in my distant youth. I can remember being enthralled, and slightly terrified of it.

It required that you strap a holster around your waist containing a toy pistol. As you watch the screen, various outlaws ( I assume) stroll into view. Suddenly, a bright flash lights up their eyes, and you must draw and shoot your pistol before they do. Beat them to the draw, and you see them drop dead. Miss, and it’s Boot Hill for you.

It was one of several games of the sort from Nintendo in the mid-70’s, and helped pave their way into the arcade realm and eventually to the birth of Mario.

Wild Gunman, a coin-operated game designed by Gunpei Yokoi for Nintendo, 1974

Better draw quick with Wild Gunman

You can read the whole, early history of Nintendo and the development of Donkey Kong here at The Dot Eaters.

Tank Game for Mattel Aquarius

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This is an interesting find, from NuGeneration Gaming. It is a video of gameplay from Space Ram, a tank game on the Mattel Aquarius personal computer.

The Aquarius was Mattel’s attempt to enter the burgeoning personal computer market, released in 1983. It’s strange that Mattel would attempt to market a computer alongside the ECS or Entertainment Computer System that they also sold as an add-on to their Intellivision console, designed to turn the Master Component into a full-fledged computer. I guess it shows that the company had no real confidence in either system. At any rate, the Aquarius failed miserably as a home computer of the era. The writing was on the wall internally at Mattel; while the official promotional tagline of the computer was Smart Enough to be Simple, programmers had their own slogan for the machine, referring to its obsolete specifications by 1983 : The System for the 70’s.

For more information on Intellivision, Mattel Electronics and the Aquarius computer, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.