REMEMBER coin-op games? It's hard to believe now, but there was a year (1982) when Americans put more money into the slots of coin-op games than they spent on movies and sporting events combined.
One of the biggest draws of the 1981-1982 boom years was Defender, a fast-paced shoot-em-up with complex controls and a variety of opponents. Defender's intense action and sophisticated opponents were amazing software to a young man learning Fortran programming on the job at Boeing. I was drawn like a moth to a flame.
That's me on the left in 1982, moments after setting a record by playing Defender for 24 hours on a single quarter, yielding a score of over 20,000,000 points. And that's also me on the right in 2005, after scoring around 500,000 (30 minutes or so) at Shorty's, a bar in Seattle's Belltown area.
As one of the consequences of the publicity that my Defender record generated, I wound up working in Chicago as the editor of JoyStik, a magazine that covered coin-op games in great detail. Ah, those were the days — playing video games as part of my "job."