How Video Games Saved the Tony Jacobs Brand

My love affair with video games began back when I was six years old. About once a month, my mom would take me for a play date at the Jacobs' house. Olga Jacobs was one of my mom's dearest friends, and she had a son who was about my age named Tony. Although my mom called these little get-togethers "play dates", that wasn't really the case. They were actually an excuse for my mom to get out of the house on a Saturday afternoon, get me out of her hair, and get her drink on with a good friend. She and Olga drank their special "Mommy juice" that Tony and I weren't aloud to have, and Tony and I were shooed into the other room to entertain ourselves.

I didn't care all that much for Tony, but like I said, these "play dates" were more about "Mommy juice" than anything else. So I was stuck. Tony was a sickly, little guy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a chili bowl haircut. He wore funny clothes that looked itchy and uncomfortable. No matter what time of year it was, he usually wore high-water corduroys and a button-up shirt. Not to pile it on, but in addition to his odd appearance his nose was always runny and he smelled like day-old cabbage. I should have felt sorry for the kid, but at the time he just weirded me out. Little did I know that one gloomy spring afternoon, that little snot would change my life.

As was typical for my visits to Tony's house, once our moms had busted out the booze and dismissed us, we would go into Tony's play room to carry out our toy choosing ritual. Hanging out with Tony would have been damn near torture if it weren't for the kid's amazing toys. I would always walk into the room before Tony, but I was careful not to walk too quickly. If I moved too fast, Tony would get really excited and try to race me. He was extremely uncoordinated, so he often times would trip and fall and in the process take me down with him, splattering me with snot and covering me with his nasty cabbage musk. I swear he could spray that stuff like a skunk. As soon as I got into the room I would find the coolest toys that I could - preferably the bigger the better - retreat into a secluded corner of the room, build what I liked to call my "powerful shielded fort of might and anger" and do my best to ignore Tony for the rest of the afternoon, warning him that anyone who penetrated the walls of my fort would die a horrible death of diarrhea and barf... What'd you expect? I was six and incredibly fascinated with bodily functions - mine and those of others. Hell, I still am.

Anyway, I moved quickly to hoard the largest, coolest toys I could find into my favorite corner and arrange them strategically to protect me from the interlocutor. However, Tony was acting strange. Instead of following me to my corner and whining and crying about how unfair it was for me to immediately turn on my diarrhea barf death shield, he plopped his little skinny butt down in front of the TV, turned it on, and flipped on a little contraption that was connected to it. Curious, I ventured out of my safe haven and sat down next to him. As I watched the little stick figure explorer run across the screen, swing from vine to vine, and jump over dark pits, I was entranced. What was this glorious device? Tony explained to me that it was a video game system called the Atari 2600, and he was playing the video game Pitfall. He paused the game and handed the controller over to me and told me to try it. I took the moist controller from Tony's clammy hands and began to play. From that point on, I was hooked, and Tony was my new best friend. He was awesome at Pitfall and could get much further in the game than I could. And that was SO COOL.

After that day, I would ask my mom on a daily basis if we could go visit Tony. Although I loved the Atari 2600, I also began to really like Tony. Once I got past his grimy appearance, I found that he was a sweet, sincere, and generous kid, and he very quickly became my best friend. For my next birthday, my mom got me an Atari 2600, but that didn't stop me from hanging out with Tony almost all the time. Not only was Tony my best friend, but he was also a trend-setter and taste-maker to me. Everything he said and did was awesome, and I wanted to say and do it too. As we grew up, Tony and I became first adopters of video games and video game systems. We were true video game geeks. Our parents probably spent enough money on video games to put both of us through college. Kind of sad. Nonetheless, as different brands of video games and video game systems came and went, Tony and I stayed close.