Discussion on:

Geek Trivia: First shots fired

...and as I recall, it was "Duck Hunt" and used a "light-gun" aimed at the TV screen. It was released in the '70's during the first console wars, and the console was an Atari-clone thatI believe was sold by Sears.

I still love to play Battlezone. I've also been playing Tempest, Joust, Final Fight, Missle Command, and Punisher. I used to get a huge adrenaline rush at the arcade playing Tempest. I'd come out of the arcade shaking from the rush. Those were the days.

I can't recall the precise year (I think it was 20 + years ago), but I remember that my son and I already had become addictive to playing Wolfenstein at home: On a Saturday morning, my young son and I stopped by the building where id then had its offices (near the intersection of I-635 & Town Ease Blvd. in Mesquite, Texas).

It was a surprise to me, but the office door was open and "they" were in. When we walked in the door, the first person we saw introduced himself as "John" and said that he was one of the inventors of Wolfenstein (he told us, but I don't now recall whether he gave his last name as Romero or Carmack, however).

We told "John" how much we both enjoyed playing Wolfenstein and that we were just curious. So he gave us a tour of id's offices, including brief introductions to the other programmers in the office. During the tour, as we would see the displays of the programmers, John told us that they were working hard on their next game, which they thought would be a really big hit. Those screens looked amazing and I believe that product was Doom in the works.

Then, before we left, John gave us two T-Shirts, each of which has "Wolfenstein 3D" on the front above a picture of a shirtless guy shooting what I think is a chaingun. On the back, it has the Apogee logo near the top, the id software logo near the middle and, sandwiched between those two logos, the phrase:

"Whatever the question, lead is the answer."

In the following years, I was chastized by teachers and other parents for allowing my son to wear that shirt -- it was a "Bad Influence."

Probably, we should have taken better care of these shirts over the years. I do believe my son still has his somewhere, but I haven't seen it it a long time -- probably because he has gone from ~4 feet tall to 6'2" and it just doesn't fit any longer.

I am looking at mine now, though. The picture on the front is a little faded and there's a stain or two on it (I suspect motor oil) . . . but these gems were printed on "Made in USA", pre-shrunk 100% cotton, Hanes "Beefy-T" white shirts, so they have held up pretty well.

Bought an Atari 400 just to play it.

It's fun to remember all the old games we played as kids and young adults, but we sure got side tracked from the original subject matter, which was FPS (first-person shooter) games. As much fun as Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, the Doom series (and the non-FPS games like Commander Keen were,) they cannot hold a candle to the thrill of today's FPS games.

I'm 42 years old, but LOVE having a frag match with my kids on the home LAN, playing Quake II, Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, Far Cry, Pain Killer and Doom 3. Our kids are blessed by the technology they have today. PS2 and X-Box are pretty neat stuff, but nothing beats playing games on a cutting edge PC with a powerful 5.1 speaker system.