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Phil & Mel In The Morning

Weekdays 6:00AM-10:00AM

Have you ever walked into the room where your kids play video games and wondered what movie or TV show they were watching? It sometimes happens to me when my boys are playing their basketball or auto racing games. It looks like a real sporting event! The graphics in today’s video games are incredibly realistic, but I can remember when they were more like cave drawings.

In the 1980s, video game characters were still blocky, pixelated blobs of color drifting across the screen. And we loved it! It was the greatest thing we had ever seen. Before that revolutionary decade, most video games were just variations on tennis, consisting of two white lines for rackets and a little white square for a ball. Pong, anyone? Here’s what some of those earliest video games looked like:

Tennis for Two, 1958

Spacewar, 1962

“Brown Box” Ping-Pong, 1969

Atari (Syzygy) Pong, 1972

Magnavox Odyssey, 1973

Atari 2600, 1977