Interesting Drug

I recently stumbled upon a Flickr account in which someone has
managed the impressive and noble task of scanning the complete
contents of several Sears and Montgomery Wards Christmas catalogs. The
sight launched me screaming headlong into the dusky realms of
nostalgia; back before the days of free two-day shipping from Amazon,
the Sears Catalog was the definitive masterwork on
consumeristic accessibility — or inaccessibility, if you were a kid
like me and couldn’t afford to buy the merchandise splayed loving
across the catalog’s 500-plus pages.

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That didn’t stop me from looking, though. I can’t even begin to
guess how many hours I squandered at my grandparents’ house, poring
over page after page of enticing game systems and G.I. Joe dioramas,
apparently with the conviction that the intensity with which I
scrutinized those items would somehow determine the likelihood of
them showing up under the Christmas tree.

Sometimes, it even worked! I stared at the G.I. Joe MOBAT so hard
that Santa took pity and dropped one under my tree that year.

Looking back at the catalog now, of course, provides an interesting
perspective on classic gaming that you can’t really glean from any
number of essays or retrospectives. The 1983 catalog, for instance,
was published at the peak of the Atari boom (which came right before
the Atari crash — we didn’t buy enough of the games listed in this
catalog that year, it seems). In those days, gaming was teetering
between becoming an enduring entertainment cornerstone and simply
washing out to be one of the novelty fads that swept America in
those days, a digital Pet Rock. As a result, the ‘83 catalog actually
lists fewer systems and games that remain recognizable in this era
than it does forgotten hangers-on and quasi-videogame cheese. 

The portable games to the right, for instance, are pretty much what
those of us who couldn’t afford a Game & Watch
had to settle for. They weren’t really video games, you see, but
operated with simplistic, motorized, physical mechanisms — not unlike
pre-video arcade games. Even in 1983, they were interesting for about
three minutes, and then you felt sad because you could have spent
those three minutes playing Cement Factory or even
knock-offs like Epoch Man.

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width="253"/>Much more interesting is the Dungeons &
Dragons portable game across the page from the depressing
faux-games. While I have fairly clear memories of just about every
game in the catalog, I don’t recall the D&D handheld at all. From
the gameplay description — move through the maze and shoot a dragon
with an arrow — it sounds pretty much Wumpus. Hell,
I even see a little bat in the upper right hand area. Yeah, it’s Wumpus.

Chances are pretty good I saw this back in the day and promptly wiped
it from my memory after feeling betrayed and angry about the game’s
lack of a hot monk chick in a fur bikini and an adorable baby unicorn
companion. Not that the D&D cartoon was particularly accurate to
the table top game upon which the show was based, but I’m going to
hazard a guess and say it was more authentic than this LCD game.

I guess whatever disappointment I may have experienced wasn’t too
scarring, though, since just about all I play these days are
portable RPGs — some of which are far more faithful to D&D than others.

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