The Arrival of Pong

 I was nine years old in the year 1975 and it was the first year of my life that contained what I call a "Great Reset" where my situation or priorities change drastically, and in my case it was my family moving across my small town to another neighborhood-which at that point meant another elementary school and new groups of friends.

On certain nights of the week, mom worked until 5 PM and then had bingo right after that (either playing or helping run it), so dad would take charge of feeding my sister and myself on those nights. The best place he would take us was a local place called Mike's Pizza. It was the best pizza in town at the time and always a treat to get.

Like many pizza places, Mike's had a small, dimly lit dining room even though most of their business was takeout. When we walked in, dad went to the counter to put in our order and my sister and I sat at a table. Across the dining room, something was...off.

One of the tables a few feet away was different. It had a glow emanating from its surface and was making sounds. My sister and I got up to see what it was, and knew immediately that this was not a table for dining. It had a large black and white screen on its surface, a few buttons, and round knobs at each end. This was the first time I had even come to understand the concept of video games, as the release of the Magnavox Odyssey a few years earlier had escaped my notice.

Dad was interested, too, and supplied quarters for us to try it out. We put the quarter in and the game started, with the ball bouncing across the screen. It did not take long to get the feel of the paddle controls and before long we were playing Pong. My young self enjoyed the game, but I would not say that I saw the potential for Space Invaders, The Bard's Tale, Super Mario Kart, or Elden Ring that day. 

To me, it was just another arcade thing, like pinball and air hockey, and that was that. America noticed, though, and Pong machines popped up everywhere for awhile, fueling the Christmas 1975 season run on home consoles that played it. Dad got one of those, and joined my sister and I playing it for a few days after the holiday. 

We had it hooked up to the tiny black and white kitchen television and there were a few sessions between my sister, dad, and myself. Mom was not interested. The appeal quickly faded once it was clear I was the best in the house at the two-player Pong and its variations on the clone console we had. There was one handball variation, I think, that I soon mastered as well.

By the new year, our Pong clone console was put away, only coming out a few times after that. I went on to hanging out with my new friends in the neighborhood, and the 1970s played out without much fanfare after Pong. Still, it is good to remember that day, sometime in the fall of 1975, where this whole passion of mine began.

My wife was kind enough to join me out in our mudroom/dive bar-cade for a little Pong to commemorate that historic day half a century ago. 

The King of Wacky Packages

 It was a humbling lesson, to eight-year-old me over half a century ago, that no matter how much passion you feel for something, no matter what level of expertise you bring to it - there's always someone else out there who is better at it than you and has more resources to pursue it. It took some nifty packaging parody stickers to teach me that in 1975, as Topps, the famed baseball card company, released Wacky Package stickers to the world.

I saw them first on a short family trip to southern Ohio to visit a relative. We had stopped at a gas station that had them on sale and I convinced Dad to buy me a pack, which was a classic road trip move most kids probably had then. It had a few stickers and a stick of standard Topps petrified gum in it, and I was mesmerized:

The following week, back home, they turned up at the Summit Street carry-out and there went a cut of my lunch money. We kids called it "Harold's" after the owner/operator, and he was glad to see us there buying candy after school when we could. The Wacky Packages were funny as hell to me in third grade, sort of an introduction to satire if you will, and I wanted to collect them all. I wanted to see them all, possess them all, and become the King of Wacky Packages, a title made up in my own weird childhood head.

Summit Street Carry-Out AKA Harold’s, now just a home.

Anyone who has collected anything like that knows that - when there is a series of anything to collect - that the last two or three will be the hardest to get. One never knows how much care went into shuffling them up at the printer/packager, but to get a complete set may mean weeks and weeks of purchasing the item, hoping to get a pack with that one rare one. 

That's where I was in third grade, down to one or two, when the rich kid in class showed up and laid out his two full sets and extras. While he had an extra one of the last one I needed for a complete set, he would not trade anything I had for it. All of the extras I had, he had in more numbers anyway. Plus, he felt special being the only one with a full set, and if I accomplished that, it would diminish his achievement.

The lesson I learned that day was that all my passion for it, all my careful moves to get a full set, were not enough to make me the King of Wacky Packages in third grade. My own sense of accomplishment was diminished knowing that whoever has the most money wins most things in life. Still, the stickers were funny and I kept picking them up.

Later, I grew up and did not let other people's accomplishments shadow my own, learning to enjoy what I enjoyed in life without comparing it to others'. I collect things I want to enjoy them as I want, not to compare them to what others have.

Here is most of what is left of my 1970s Wacky Packages. I had peeled the stickers and put them in a blank book, and later transferred them to a photo album, before finally framing them in 2013:

In the 1980s, as a teenager, I collected the new series as well. I did not want to grow up and lose my sense of humor. This time, I had enough financial resources to complete a set. I had peeled them and put them in a similar book to the one I used in the 1970s, but that booklet was lost sometime after I moved out of my parent's home. My best guess is that I left it in the basement and Mom threw it out later during a junk purge. A damaged checklist was recovered from the basement later:

In the 1990s, as an adult, I collected them again, as the Wacky Packages showed up at my comic book store. I completed that set and still have those in an album today. There was also a cool poster one could assemble by using the back of the checklist card:

A few years ago, I saw that there were two art books for sale showing the 1970s Wacky Packages, and picked them up too. What was cool about those art books were introductions from the original artists and some never-released designs made into actual Wacky Packages!

At some point in the 2010s, someone I knew bought me a modern pack of Wacky Packages. You can tell the era by the one sticker for “Super Mario Fart”.

Finally, sometime after the pandemic in the early 2020s, my adventures took me to a fancy stationary store where, by the cash register, there were little 3D-printed Wacky Packages of various products for sale. I didn’t buy one but smiled as the parody of products and packaging continues, even if not in sticker form.

I'll never go gung ho for Wacky Packages save for what I currently have. Vintage video games are expensive enough, and what I have saved of my Wacky Packages - especially those two books - are enough to get a chuckle out of me as they are.

Now, Trog-Lo-Dytes Action Packs are another matter entirely. That's a story for next year, though.

Why Do I Still Have My Matchbox Cars at 58?

 I'm a nostalgic guy, and have kept a few toys from my childhood. There are scattered parts and pieces of Micronauts, one small Lego spaceship, a few other minor things of sentimental value to me. This includes a small, officially branded carrying case with a few dozen Matchbox toy cars in it. Unlike my old Odyssey 2 videogames, none of these memorable trinkets of my youth that somehow survived are engaging to me now.

But there they sit, my Matchbox cars, on a high shelf in a closet, where they have been in the seven years since I moved to my current apartment. Before that, eleven years in storage at a previous apartment, eight years at another apartment, and so forth back through my past of many apartments I've lived in since leaving home forty years ago.

Once in awhile I do check on them, get them down, admire the craftsmanship, remember their old value to me and the times my friends and I had with them, and put them away. I never wanted to pass them along to a child in my family (I was smart enough to not have kids myself in our pre-collapse civilization), they certainly never will reach a meaningful collector value without their original boxes, they just...take up space.

In our youth, those cars, as well as the American made Hot Wheels toys, were a part of all of our lives. Each of us curated a collection and finding that one Matchbox that no one else had was always a win. 

They were cheap enough in cost that it was relatively easy to convince mom or dad to get you one when they dragged you along to go shopping for something else. One time, mom took me along to a craft store a few blocks away, a quaint basement store with a side entrance under the owner’s home. Sure enough, they had a few toys by the cash register and I got mom to buy me this beauty:

 I never had much in the way of those orange Hot Wheels tracks, but some of my friends did, and I would take my cars over to enjoy their elaborate racing setups. Those were good memories.

Our “peak Matchbox” times involved two small model cities we constructed to play with our cars. The first one was called Ourtown and was a spontaneous creation one day when we were hanging out in the far back scrap yard of Gledhill Road Machinery. The dirt was dry having not been rained on in awhile, but there was a small gully that was the width of a two lane Matchbox road.

We didn’t even have our cars there that day, but we brought them back later. Over a few weeks we expanded the roads, created our own “homes” out of the scrap around us, and made little roads signs using pieces of slate we had found, scratching names of places in them. It grew big enough to have a countryside and a second, smaller town, with the whole area becoming called Miniland.

It didn’t last very long, though, as someone from Gledhill ran a tractor over the area to cut down grass and weeds. Years later I had the thought to draw a map of Ourtown to the best of my memory:

Next came an indoor Miniland, built on the unused ping pong table in my folks’ basement, which rested atop a similarly unused and neglected pool table. We used construction paper to build shops and homes, roads and a bay with a dock. In the center of downtown I used a piece of poster board to create a massive skyscraper.

It was all pretty cool, but we were kids and got bored with it in a few weeks. I don’t remember getting any other Matchbox cars after that and we soon reached an age where our activities were more teenage in nature.

So the Matchbox cars went into the case and travelled with me from apartment to apartment, providing occasional reminders of the above memories, but something else too. 

Holding onto them is holding onto a small part of myself that, to this day, doesn’t want to grow up and hopes that my friends and I will gather again and play with those cars. It’s absurd and will never happen, but it’s there. Adult friendships are a lot different than childhood friendships and a part of me misses the simplicity of those bonds.

I can spare the closet space for the foreseeable future to hold onto that.

Here is the carrying case:

Here are a few of my favorites:

Parked in front of the open case, from left to right, we have: 

Commer Ice Cream Canteen

This is my oldest Matchbox, made a few years before I was even born it seems, and acquired as a hand me down toy, I think. There is no number or date on the bottom of it. It’s actually kind of creepy too because the little guy inside is oversized compared to the rest of the vehicle. His legs should be sticking out the bottom, Flintstones-style.

Racing Mini (Series No.29, 1970)

This early acquisition (I was four years old) was a personal favorite as I seemed to like small, zippy European cars. As an adult I had a few VW Beetles, but joy came during a trip to San Antonio a few years back when we got a real Mini Cooper as a rental car. 

Volks Dragon (No.37, 1971)

This red souped up VW Beetle became reality for me in the mid to late 1980s as my second VW Beetle of the era was a souped up, jacked up, near replica of this toy. Hot rod red with after market modifications including jacked up rear tires and a pair of badass Monza exhaust pipes. The Matchbox sat on the dash for awhile.

Cosmobile (No.88, 1975)

Competition with Hot Wheels was fierce back then, so things got weird, with Matchbox releasing some strange space-themed models with different colors of metal and amber-tinted windows. 

Rolls Royce Silver Shadow II (No.39, 1979)

This gorgeous toy features a silver finish with red interior, front doors that actually open, and tiny shock absorbers. It was one of two Matchbox cars that sat in the driveway of my home at indoor Miniland.

Porsche Turbo (No.3,1979)

This remains the pride of my collection and was the other car sitting in my driveway at indoor Miniland. If filthy rich money ever rains down on me, I’d track down a restored real life version of this car. The Matchbox sports a unique metallic root beer brown color with a dull yellow interior. My friends were able to find this Matchbox too, just not in this color.

Editor's Note: This is the first entry into my "Half a Century" series which will explore not just video games, but other nerdy stuff I was into fifty years ago.