By the Dashboard Lights

by David Friedli

November 29, 2007

Video for the Rest of Us

I remember quite clearly my first experience with a video game.

One hot and humid summer day, my friend David Fowler and I walked into the Dairy Sweet in Milford, Nebraska and placed our orders for cherry slushies.

Or maybe it was a chocolate-dipped cone. Or a marshmallow sundae with chocolate ice cream. But I think it was a slushy.

Anyway, David said, “Oh yeah, have you played “Pong” yet?”

“Ping pong…table tennis?” I asked.

“No, Pong,” he said, making a sweeping gesture toward what looked like my mother’s stereo cabinet with a television screen flush-mounted in the top. “Here, let me show you.”

We sat down on either side of the walnut-sided box, and he proceeded to bounce a white video cube off the sides of the screen and straight at me as I tried in vain to somehow manipulate my electronic paddle in front of that elusive video ball.

That day my distain for video games was born.

I liked pinball games. Mom never approved of me hanging around the Corner Pocket, a pinball and pool joint downtown. I think she hated seeing me throw into those machines the profits from mowing lawns and delivering papers.

Pinball machines—real pinball, with heavy steel marbles and flippers and triple-score chutes and electrified bumpers that snap with energy when they hit—are relics today.

And I never found much success with video games. Until now.

Enter “Guitar Hero”, a video game for the rest of us. It is the first video game I was instantly successful at playing.

Now, understand successful means scoring a reasonable score at the easiest level. But there is some success. It beats my first experience playing Pong.

Guitar Hero is a marriage between “Sing Along with Mitch Miller” and the plastic Hanna Montana guitar every pre-adolescent girl in America has on her Christmas list.

The plastic guitar plugs into any number of video game consoles that every boy in America got for Christmas last year.

A giant guitar fretboard advances toward the player from the video screen and colored lights indicate which of five buttons to push on the guitar, simulating the chords a rock star would play.

And thanks to Charlie and Scottie and Jimmy and their huge stereo boom boxes blasting “Paradise City”, “Shout at the Devil”, “Woman” and a dozen other 1980’s heavy metal anthems from the back of the wrestling team bus in those days, these songs resonate in my subconscious.

I know them, even though I don’t know them. And because I know a few chords on a real guitar, I have found a video game I enjoy.

So long, Pong. There is a new Hero in my life.