PixlBit

My dad built one of those Heathkit TVs. For a long time, the TV tube with the bare circuitry sat on a console in our living room. My parents made sure to put the fear of God into me if I ever touched anything behind the screen. A little later, my dad built a console to house the TV, so they didn't have to worry about me electrocuting myself. We had a TI-99/4A computer hooked to it that my dad would let me use on special occasions, and my sister had an old Pong clone console. I thought it was just cool making stuff on a TV screen move. My mom also had a TRS-80 computer, but since that had its own monitor includede, it wasn't as neat as making things move on the living room TV.

I think the first time I saw the word "tanuki/tanooki" was in a 1989/90 Nintendo Power feature on Super Mario Bros. 3. While the leaf power-up was stil called Raccoon Mario, the full-on suit was called a Tanuki Suit. Other than that, most English localizations of Japanese media, including anime like Ranma 1/2, referred to them as "raccoons." I guess even Animal Crossing's resident loan shark is still referred to as a "raccoon" in US media even though he's called "Tom Nook."

I've played all of the games on the top list except for Computer Space MUD 1, Mattel Auto Race, and Sprint 2. I've played plenty of derivatives of Computer Space, including Atari's Space War. One game from the 70s that I played that isn't on the list was Temple of Apshai.

Fun fact: the best selling video game hardware of the 1970s wasn't the Atari 2600. It was Nintendo's Color TV Game, which was a Pong clone sold only in Japan. Even in the 1970s Nintendo was still the king, lol.

I bought the Capcom Fighting Collection. One of the games included is Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, and I've been playing that online quite a bit. I used to play it a lot when I had a 360.

Computer games were still in their infancy, so those of us who were interested in them played what we had at the time. It should also be noted that 50,000 copies sold  was considered "blockbuster" status for a computer game back then, so there were admittedly not a lot of us who were interested. Crowther's kids loved his game, though. 

At the time, it was still a novelty. I played these games on Atari 130XE, which was still pretty primitive. While RPGs and graphical adventures had begun to come out by then, text adventures were still in preference as a way to present a game that didn't involve shooting space bugs, eating dots, or jumping over barrels on limited technology. However, by the time more graphical adventure games had come into vogue, I had gotten into RPGs, though my parents were into point-and-click adventures. So while they were playing The 7th Guest and Myst, I was playing Final Fantasy and Ultima. 

 I'm a pretty avid reader. I was reading Stephen King and Douglas Adams in grade school, which is part of why I missed out on so many free Personal Pan pizzas through the Book It! program. So that was part of why I took to these games relatively well at the time. 

I never played this one, mostly because it came out around the same time as the Switch and BotW did, and I've kind of been heavily invested in the Switch since then. Maybe once I can get my hands on a PS5 I'll take a look at this series.  Graphically, it looks pretty damn good.

One reasons why Microsoft doesn't do more in the phone space is that mobile market is where Microsoft sufffered a pretty humiliating defeat in the market. Windows Mobile was one of the first moblie phone platforms, and the iPhone slaughtered it easily ten years later. Windows Phone never had a chance against both iOS and Android. I think Microsoft is scared of the mobile market because if more casual users ditched PCs for mobile devices, they'd lose a lot of money. It's one of the few threats to the dominance of Windows. 

I remember doing that too. 

Of course, in Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the computer would take those four-lettter words as literal commands, meaning the player character would carry them out depending on context. 

I had a lot of these games, as well as the Scott Adams games. I didn't really play point-and-click graphical adventure games until Shadowgate on the NES and Martian Memorandum on PC. I didn't play a lot of those, either, because RPGs filled that niche for me a lot better.  I actually did some of the Scott Adams games at 5 or 6 on TRS-80, then played the Infocom stuff at 10 on Atari 130XE.

 Now that I think of it, I do remember playing a graphical adventure on a friend's Apple IIe called Tass Times in Tonetown. The guy who wrote it, Michael Berlyn, started out as an Infocom implementer (he wrote Suspended, in fact), and went on to create Bubsy the bobcat on SNES/Genesis.

I remember dealing with a lot of copy protection schemes. Starflight had a code wheel, and if you failed to enter the correct code, you'd be stopped by the "Corporate Police," who would give you one last chance. If you failed then, they'd destroy your ship. SimCity constantly bombarded your city with earthquakes. And supposedly, Earthbound could detect whether it was being played on a SNES or an emulator, as it had several spot-checks throughout the game that would not only freeze the game if a bootleg was detected, it would also delete your save files. 

Plus, I used to love reading the manuals for Zelda I, Metroid, and Kid Icarus.