In the summer of 1979, between Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes” making everyone weepy and KISS declaring their manufactured love on my first Walkman (a true miracle of Japanese engineering at the time), I was already dreaming of amazing adventures.
The Atari, a marvel of its time, was still in its infancy, and the 2600 had just burst into homes worldwide, promising digital revolutions with its faux-wood veneer. The allure of this new technology was palpable, sparking excitement and wonder in all who encountered it.
My Atari sat largely untouched beside my bookshelf, its promise of digital adventure perpetually overshadowed by the siren song of paper and ink.
The books(Enid Blyton) never disappointed – they didn’t need joysticks or loading times, never crashed, and created worlds far more vivid than any 8-bit graphics could muster.
My horse, patient and real in the paddock outside, offered adventures that no game could match.
Years later, when WarGames was released and Falken’s Maze entered our collective imagination, I recognized the same tension between the digital and the real that had shaped my earlier choices. Perhaps it was the idea that somewhere in the endless lines of code, there might be a game that wasn’t really a game at all but a door to something bigger.
Years later, the Atari vanished during a move. Sometimes, I wonder if it ended up in some landfill in Volgermeerpolder, joining the legendary buried cache of E.T. cartridges. Or maybe it found its way to a collector’s shelf, a pristine relic of an age when we first began teaching machines to play.
But what I truly lost wasn’t just the console – it was that unique moment in time when technology still felt magical, not yet mundane. The disappearance of the Atari marked the end of an era, a time when the digital world was still a place of wonder and mystery, not just a part of everyday life.
When a walkman could be both a portal to music and a barrier to conversation when horses and books competed with pixels and programs, and when we could still believe that somewhere, in some government basement, there might be a game that could talk back to us.
Looking back from our AI-saturated present, 1979 feels like a different universe. The WOPR wasn’t even a gleam in Hollywood’s eye yet, but we were already wrestling with questions about machines and humanity that would define the decades ahead. The maze has only grown more complex.
I never did get lost in digital mazes, but maybe that was the point—some games are better left unplayed, and some technologies are better left imagined.
In the end, the horse (Schwiebertje) and the books won out, teaching me that the best simulations of life are often life itself.
May harmony find you.
Irena Phaedra
The C.O.M.C. Files 