2600

My mom and stepdad build a room in their house designed to please my children. They fill it with toys for a girl and a boy, and paper a jungle scene upon the walls. They buy a bunk bed.

I don’t recognize this room in the sense that I cannot relate to its indulgence of childhood imagination. It’s an altar to disappointment and regret. It’s a nice gesture. I’m too tired to hate it, and just barely above not letting my kids visit. Just barely above shouting when they get drunk and accidentally reveal that the room is an apology.

In the corner sits their 2600. I refer to it as their 2600 because in those days nothing was ours, even the gifts we received for Christmas, even the presents from other people. Children in 1984 were more like indentured tenants, and besides, life itself was so tenuous back then anyway. I saw my first PG-13 movie that year, in which I learned that the Soviets would invade the United States from Mexico, only to be defeated by guerilla youth from Michigan, who are able to stop their crying and turn it into something else.

Tristan is immediately drawn to the Atari, and for some reason, so am I. We were 5 years late onto the video game scene, waiting until the price had dipped below $50, until you could get games at the Goodwill stores. I pick up a cartridge, the design of which always promised so much more than what the technology could deliver. The cover advertises 27 games, and the illustrations detail training jets launching missiles, tanks rolling through the gathering dust into battle, and biplanes from the 1920s bombing what appears to be a nuclear class destroyer.

I sit down next to my son cross-legged and hand him a controller. I touch the fake wood paneling of the console in near disbelief and punch in the cartridge. We select the game that pits one bomber against three planes. The battle scene appears, and two identical Lego-shaped blocks dominate the skyscape.

“What are those?”

“Those are the clouds of war.”

“It looks like Tetris.”

But I have no time to explain that these games were powered by imagination. The graphics were secondary. If that.

He guides his three Marionette-like planes towards my massive bomber, and taps the orange button unbelievably fast, as he has learned to do with his X-Box. Three solitary dots float slowly and silently towards my plane.

“This is boring.”

“I know that.”

I duck behind a cloud, wondering if the disappearing act will confuse him. He yawns. I head for the top left corner of the television screen and reappear at the bottom right, head straight up towards the top right and reappear again at the bottom left. I notice his three planes are in a holding pattern. I look at him and he’s not even holding the joystick, but resting his cheeks in the palms of his hand, waiting for me to get this out of my system.

“Not a big fan of this game, huh?”

“Combat’s dumb.”

Of course, that’s not exactly what he said. The double meaning would have been just too perfect. Like the artwork on the covers of those old games, my recollections promise so much more than what reality can actually deliver.