Joystix

It doesn't happen that often anymore, but a few weeks ago, I was in the grocery store with my granddaughter Sophia when a guy approached me with The Look in his eyes.

At first, I thought he might've just been one of those random weirdos you sometimes have to deal with in today's modern society, but when he pulled out a genuine paper notepad and a pen, I knew he was one of Them. Sure enough, his eyes got all wide and his hand started to shake as he asked me for an autograph.

My poor granddaughter got really confused. I tried to explain to her that I was famous once, a long time ago. But then she started asking me questions, ones I wasn't quite ready to answer, ones she isn't quite old enough to hear.

I'm only in my mid 50s, so I don't think I'll be kicking the bucket anytime soon. Still, though, I thought it was time for me to get my story down on paper. Or, excuse me, "down" on a digital document.

That way, when Sophia's old enough, she can learn exactly what her grandmother was up to in the 1980s. And who knows? Maybe someone else out there might be interested in my story as well.

And so, without further adieu, here is the complete - and unabridged - story of how I became the winner of the PixelSmash Super Showdown video game tournament in 1986.

I think it might've been the fall of 1982 when I saw my first video game, although the truth is that I wasn't very impressed.

I was at the roller rink with my friends Lisa and Amy, and we saw a group of boys gathered around what we initially thought was a pinball machine. They were shouting and hollering and acting retarded, as teenage boys do, so we went to get a closer look. And that's when I saw that they were playing Asteroids.

As I said, I wasn't terribly impressed at first. It was just a gray triangle on a screen surrounded by some gray blobs.

But every time one of those boys pressed the red button on the joystick, the little triangle (which was supposed to be a spaceship) would fire off its gun, making a loud noise. And if the shot blew up an asteroid, it also made a loud digital boom, and those two things together were all it took to get the boys jumping up and down and hooting like a pack of wild chimpanzees.

I don't really remember much else about the game. I know my friend Lisa had this super long, colorful scarf that she was wearing that she was sure would get her lots of attention, but she ended up getting the end caught up in the wheels of her skates, and she fell and broke her nose. Other than that, it was just a typical weekend day at the roller rink, a place that still lives fondly in my heart.

It probably wasn't until sometime the next year when I got my first real introduction to video games, the one that got me hooked. My friend Amy was dating a guy named Christopher, and we were all supposed to meet up at the mall. But then when Amy called his house, his mother passed along a message, saying he was at the video game arcade and that we should go there to pick him up.

Remember, this was long before the internet was invented, so neither of us had any idea of what to expect. In our world, we only had a few places we would hang out - the local park, the mall, the bowling alley, the pizza place downtown, this one convenience store, and, of course, the roller rink.

Places like bars were off-limits to us on account of our age, and none of us had the money to go to swanky joints like fancy restaurants or the theater or whatever.

When the first video games appeared, business owners weren't quite sure where to put them, so a lot of them went into bars at first. After all, that's where the pinball games were (mostly) located, and so video games kind of had a seedy reputation.

But as time went on, business owners figured out kids had money to waste on the things too, so they started appearing in places like the roller rink.

A few savvy people figured out that video games were enough of a draw all on their own, and so the first video arcades started popping up. Since those days are long gone now, I'll pause here and describe them to you. Keep in mind, they might sound silly now, but to me, they were like a wonderland.

First of all, they were usually small, often just rectangular spaces wedged into strip malls. The business owner would jam as many arcade machines in as physically possible, each standing right next to each other, with barely enough space to walk between them.

A few enterprising places might have a concession stand in the center where they'd sell stuff like soda, popcorn, and leathery old hot dogs that'd been rotating on the electric grill too long.

But mostly it was just video games. One play was a quarter (25 cents), although later, some had special features where you could get boosts and other stuff for more money.

As a teenager perpetually short of money, the goal was to put in your quarter and try to stay alive as long as you could. And it was surprisingly easy to blow through a roll of quarters ($10) in just a couple of hours. That may not sound like much these days, but it was a fortune to us.

That's what Amy and I walked into that fateful day that changed my life forever. The place was called Neon Junction, which we thought was a cool and mysterious name. Inside, there were barely any lights, all the illumination coming from the flashing images on the screens of the games.

The sound in an arcade was deafening, each game competing to outdo the other with bleeps, booms, and digital audio effects designed to entice young boys (and a few young girls!) to plop in their coin and give it a whirl.

After a moment, my eyes got adjusted to the dim lighting in the place, and I probably stood there for a good couple of minutes, utterly entranced by what I was seeing and hearing. Everywhere I looked, I saw bright, colorful graphics, little animated spaceships, monsters, and people running around and blasting aliens and having the time of their lives. I was hooked even before I spent my first quarter.

If all that sounds cheesy to you, keep in mind that we didn't even have a computer in my house. The only "high-tech" gadget in our house was the television, which was interesting enough, but it sat in the living room, and all you could do with it was sit in front of it and wait to see what came on.

Video games, on the other hand, seemed like they came from another world.

Not only were all the graphics mind-blowing to our simple teenage minds, but the very fact that you could interact with them was amazing. No longer were you just sitting there passively, but you had to grab the joystick and use your wits in order to survive getting eaten by colorful ghosts or blasted by a giant angry centipede from outer space.

These days, I guess everyone is oversaturated with interactive stuff from your phones to your smart watches, but not us back in the 1980s. It was like going from a drab, simple world to a pulsating digital wonderland where you were the hero.

Only by using your intellect and hand-eye coordination could you hope to last for longer than a minute in that bleeping, dynamic landscape of mesmerizing monsters hell-bent on trying to kill you, and it was intoxicating.

But wait, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself because that first day, all I really did was stand there and watch other people play. Amy took us over to where her boyfriend was playing a game called Missile Command where you were in charge of this crudely-drawn city, and you had to send up flak to destroy missiles raining down from the sky that wanted to blow up your bases.

It was never one of the games I liked to play, and Amy's boyfriend Christopher wasn't very good, so it was probably 10 minutes or so maximum that I stood there and watched him clumsily fail at keeping his city safe from incoming nukes.

After that, we went to the mall, and we probably had greasy fast food pizza at the food court before shopping for trinkets at Kaybee Toys. I really don't remember. The only thing that was imprinted on my mind was how much I wanted to go back to Neon Junction again.

Again, you might laugh when reading this dearest Sophia, but at that point, I wasn't even thinking of playing the games myself. I barely had any money at all in those days, and all those games looked so intimidating that it never even crossed my mind to play them myself. At first, all I wanted to do was watch other people playing them because that was exciting enough for me.

But it was a while before I got to go back to Neon Junction. I did all the normal stuff that kids did back then like sitting up in my room and listening to the radio, carefully timing the DJ's patter so that I could record my favorite songs on a cassette.

Or I'd doodle in my Trapper Keeper and dream of what it would be like to have a steady boyfriend and where he'd take me in his car, which was going to be a convertible, of course. You know, typical teenage girl stuff.

I kept thinking maybe Amy and I would get a chance to hang out with Christopher as he played video games, but Amy and Christopher broke up not too long afterward, so that was that. I went out on a few dates with this guy David, but he was more into sports and making out at the drive-in, so

I kinda lost hope that there would be any chance of me going back to Neon Junction. Occasionally, I'd leaf through one of the magazines dedicated to video games at the B. Dalton bookstore at the mall, but that was about it.

But then everything changed the day that our washing machine broke.