![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Ap-Article-Arcade-Copy.jpg\")
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People occasionally ask me how long I’ve been into “retro” gaming and I never have a good answer for them because I’ve been playing a lot of these retro games since before they were retro. Here’s an interesting thing I ran across today that reminded me of that fact.<\/p>\n
I was interviewed for an article titled “Classic Video Games Make Comeback” by a reported from the Associated Press. The interview took place over the phone and a day or two after that, they sent a photographer out to the house to take pictures of me with some of my gaming collection. The article was picked up by most national newspapers and websites.<\/p>\n
That happened twenty years ago, in the summer of 2004. Twenty years ago, classic video games were “making a comeback,” and I was considered to be enough of a subject matter expert on the topic that someone reached out to interview me. One of the funny things about that article is that the then-modern consoles being discussed, like Nintendo’s Gameboy Advance, are considered to be retro systems today. There’s a bit in the article about how Nintendo is cashing in on the retro crazy by re-releasing updated version of Super Mario Bros<\/em>. and The Legend of Zelda<\/em>, again back in 2004. Since then, Nintendo has released multiple Mario games, including Super Mario Bros. U<\/em> in 2012 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder<\/em> in 2023. To put the date of that AP article in perspective, it was published two years before Nintendo released the Wii. <\/p>\n Here’s a link to that article, if you want to read it: Classic Video Games Make Comeback<\/a> (CBSNews.com)<\/p>\n On a recent episode of my podcast Sprite Castle I covered Congo Bongo for the Commodore 64<\/a>. Congo Bongo is a super old and retro game — nobody would argue that. It was released by Sega in arcades back in 1983 as a pseudo-3D (“isometric”) competitor to Donkey Kong, and found its way to home consoles and computers later that same year. But the thing is, I remember playing it when it was a new release in arcades, and I have a copy of the cartridge for the Commodore 64 that I got from someone (Jeff, probably) back in the mid-80s. So, yeah — I play retro games, but I played those same games when they were new.<\/p>\n Anyway. That interview I did for the AP was a neat experience. I had friends in New Jersey and family in Chicago all see the article. The one newspaper it didn’t seem to run in was ours here in Oklahoma — go figure. Although a lot of people already knew my name, that article helped me get writing gigs at a few magazines and helped me make a few other connections. Not bad for playing and being willing to talk about video games — games that didn’t seem to be that old to me then, or now, twenty years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People occasionally ask me how long I’ve been into “retro” gaming and I never have a good answer for them because I’ve been playing a lot of these retro games since before they were retro. Here’s an interesting thing I ran across today that reminded me of that fact. I was interviewed for an article titled “Classic Video Games Make Comeback” by a reported from the Associated Press. The interview took place over the phone and a day or two after that, they sent a photographer out to the house to take pictures of me with some of my gaming… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,144,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arcade","category-computers","category-main"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Ap-Article-Arcade-Copy.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14830"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14835,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14830\/revisions\/14835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}