Reminiscing - The Gormogons

This is a bit of a diversion from the recent topics, but while I was doing a little lunchtime reading, I came across this article in Wired! Out of the 14 items mentioned, we owned about half of them and I played almost all of them (Vectrex, Blip and UFO Master Blaster being the ones I am unfamiliar with). My brother and I had battles with our Big Traks (note, we did not have the optional trailer accessory) , Merlin was a popular car time killer, and I had forgotten Dark Tower until I saw the picture (by the way, you can play an online Flash version of Dark Tower here but it’s just not the same).

We have “family game night” once or twice a week where we play a variety of games, largely some really entertaining card games like Loot!, Sleeping Queens, Duck Duck Bruce!, and Slamwich. (Click through if you’r elooking for good card games for ages 6-12). But I did hit eBay last year and purchased a good condition Stop Thief, which the kids love. It’s good not to see them 2 feet from the TV set with a Playstation controller fused to their hands.

It’s easy these days to scowl at the seemingly primitve games of our childhood (like Adventure for the Atari 2600 where you move your knight (a greyish block) around different color castles and rooms) or even the text-based adventures (“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike“). But at times I think that the power of the imagination that was needed back then has been lost as of late. Heck, even Legos has taken the route of highly specialized, custom pieces. Not that it’s a bad thing, it’s just a different time.

I would be at fault if I don’t make at least a mention of Agent USA, a timeless classic – just for ‘Puter.

Picture from RobotRoom.com with an article about taking one of the Big Traks apart.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.