Waltzing for Dreamers

The day we brought home the Atari 2600 was a day of many firsts for me. It was, for example, the first time my parents told me to lie. As we piled out of our brick-red AMC, Mom mentioned casually, “So if someone asks, we got it as a gift. We’re behind on the rent, and if the landlord found out we spent money on this, well…” Once Dad gave the landlord-all-clear signal, Mom yanked the giant black and orange box out of the trunk and sprinted across our apartment complex courtyard with Dad leading the way. Keeping pace behind them, my sister and I found this behavior glamorous, as if we were a family of international spies.

For years before the Atari arrived, I simply stared at the grocery’s arcade games, watching attract sequences while Mom shopped. Quarterless and too short to reach anything, I’d stand there imagining what it would be like to man the controls. I thought that I would be pretty good if I would ever get the chance to play.

Despite all my expectations, Missile Command proved that I was terrible at video games. This was intensely frustrating. Perhaps it was because of the feeling that lives were at stake. Watching the last of my cities explode in nuclear holocaust filled me with a righteous anger so strong I actually let out a blood-curdling yell. My parents were visibly taken aback at my reaction; they had never seen me so angry. For hours I kept playing, kept failing, and kept getting more frustrated.
“Maybe you should take a break,” said Mom. I glared back at her red-faced with teary, bleary eyes. I had waited so long for this. I was supposed to be good at this. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t stop playing, and Mom didn’t stop me.

There wasn’t much glitz in growing up poor, but when our parents occasionally splurged there was an exhilarating joy to the irresponsibility, a rare feeling of freedom. Fortunately, the spree of buying an Atari opened a future path to cheap entertainment. For a modest sum, a single game occupied us for weeks at a time. Missile Command and Super Breakout alone entertained my sister and me for an entire summer. After the video game crash, my parents raided the bargain bin at Sears and bought up a bunch of games for five bucks each. Over the next year, they smartly rationed them out of a hidden box in the hall closet for birthdays and Christmas.

Times got tougher for us later. We had more trouble making rent, got kicked out, and ended up across town at another apartment building. The whole process inevitably repeated itself every year and a half or so. There were no allowances for long stretches of time, but lucky for us we had the dependable Atari. You might be forced to leave all your friends and attend a different school in a few months, but your old buddy Yars’ Revenge would make the trip with you. Maybe you had played it a hundred times by then, but at least they couldn’t take that away.

The frequent moves meant leaving old playmates and trying to get new ones, but video games allow you to find fast friends at any school. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor if you were a gamer. You had Pitfall II, and they had Star Raiders. If neither of you had played the other’s game, you were probably going to be pals soon.

Thinking back, having games helped soothe a lot of problems, even if those problems were caused by the lack of money to afford things like game systems in the first place. There’s a snake eating its tail in that logic somewhere, but after years of not understanding why my parents recklessly spent money on us at times, I finally figured it out.

One frosty morning I was standing in line for the Wii idly chatting with the guy next to me. He had already lined up eight times elsewhere to find the system for his young nephews with no luck so far, and I commended him on being a dedicated uncle. “Well, I know it’s just a toy, a material thing,” he admitted, “but they need fun in life, fun and imagination. It’s where their dreams come from.”

It seemed overly-dramatic to me at the time, but now I know the man was right. We needed dreams. Maybe we even needed them just a little bit more than the other kids. So I’d like to say something here that I’m not sure I ever actually said: Thanks, Mom and Dad. Thanks for risking half the rent on a dream machine all those years ago. It was worth it.