Ode to Squandered Youth

Happy Birthday PacMan!

As anyone knows from Google, today is PacMan's 30th birthday.  Wow I feel old.  While I never had an Atari, I spent many an hour playing PacMan at friend's houses who were lucky enough to have their own Atari's.

Don't get the idea that my brothers and I were unfairly deprived (though I'm not sure not having a video game really qualifies as deprivation), because we too had our own video game.  Unlike 99.9% of other people out there who had their own video games, we had an Odyssey.  What's an Odyssey?  It's what you have when you live in a tiny town and have a Grandpa who owns a furniture/hardware/carpet store that sells Philco TV sets.

As far as I know, the Magnavox Odyssey was pretty much obsolete before it even came out thanks to the awesomeness of Atari.  Still, we loved our Odyssey, and the games we played were suspiciously similar to Atari games.  Atari's signature game was of course PacMan.  Odyssey's signature game was Pick Axe Pete, which was very much the same concept.  Also a game I must say I was Queen of among all our family players.  While in PacMan the goal is to traverse a maze and eat all the little dots while evading Winky, Blinky, Inky, and Clyde (Surprised I can remember all those without looking them up?), the goal in Pick Axe Pete was to also traverse a maze and make it to the key to go through the "door" to the next level while evading boulders you could either smash with your pick (which quickly disappeared...I guess you wore it out smashing boulders) or just jump over them.  The highlight was when you jumped Pete, represented by a poor imitation of a stickman, into the door to the next level, he'd do full-screen jumping jacks.  We always guessed he was really happy to get to the next level, where the boulders came quicker and more frequently.

We loved Pick Axe Pete.  Every trip our family made through Webb City, MO took us past King Jack Park, which has a monument to area mining history and the lead and zinc miners who made the cities of Webb City and Joplin into boom towns.  To us it was simply a monument to our favorite video game, and we never passed the park without exclaiming, "Look!  It's Pick Axe Pete!"  If those poor miners only knew...