All the Video Game Consoles I’ve Ever Owned in Chronological Order, Pt. 1 of 4

Primitive Macintosh Computer (1987-1992)
Any individual with the privilege of watching Macs ‘grow up’ alongside the PC will recall an impossible contrast: There was the tall-tall-tall ‘fridge-looking object’ that breathed and huffed dot-matrix paper in the basement of my friend where we played a text-based adventure called ‘Adventure’ nearby her dad’s NO FUCKING KIDDING REAL LIFE SCIENCE LAB and then there was a considerably smaller obedient miniature ‘tan box with screen + mouse’ in my basement nearby where my mom washed our clothes. Think I might have had a ‘smock’/easel in similar vicinity, recall a friend named ‘Ashlie’ flipping the fuck out when I accidentally got a dot of blue ‘Crayola marker’ on her white pants.

(My friend’s name was ‘Charlotte’ and we lived within walking distance of one another)

Once I heard my mother calling me frantically from the basement and I came down to see her observing with an anxious expression a black screen featuring an explosion of ‘B&W’ fireworks and my mother was hysterically saying ‘Michael is going to kill me’ and I moved the single-button mouse thereby disabling the screensaver and simultaneously relieving/embarrassing her [thereby creating a story suitable for laugh-til-you-cry recounting at family gatherings to date.]

On this ‘platform’ I engaged in interaction with something recalled with fondness by ~5% of the game industry as ‘HyperCard Stack Games’, which loosely translates to ‘things involving clicking on things to create a sequence of slowly resolving images of other things’. There was a game called ‘The Manhole’ which involved burning a dragon’s toast, listening to seahorses singing, a rolltop desk, and just clicking around making things happen solving puzzles [via trial + error versus particular comprehensible logic].

NOTABLE: first intro to ‘indie games’, via a CD entitled ’99 Shareware/Freeware titles’ all of which involved clicking + various degrees of ‘broken-ness’. A game entitled ‘Pencils’ taught me the concept of the Egyptian sphinx in merely one example wherein things that ‘happened’ in the ‘adventure gaming genre’ provided priceless ‘cultural learnings’ which I would employ well into my adult life.