Classic Video Games Are Reborn On The Internet

By Chris Kiriapolous

Starting in the late seventies, children who lived in household with enough disposable income became the first generation of home video gamers. A lot of the children of that bygone era have carried their love of playing on video game consoles into adulthood. It’s not rare to find a household these days to feature multiple video game systems and huge libraries of games that involve hours, days, weeks, and even months of devoted gameplay.

Games have come a long way in the past thirty years, evolving from 4-bit systems to 8-bit, then 16-bit, until they stopped counting in bits. Early games offered little in the way of graphics and sounds, containing little more than crude shapes composed of series of rectangles, and simple bleeps or explosion noises. The first game, pong, which debuted in the early seventies, was a crude rendering of ping pong where players used a knob to slide their rectangular paddles back and forth to knock the ball back to their opponent.

When the Atari Video Computer System was released, its controls involved a joystick and a button. From there, the rudiments of modern gaming were born. With one hand, you hold the base and hit a ‘fire’ button with your thumb. With the other, you work a directional control. This style of gameplay led to the development of the first classic games, whose clever challenges have ensured that even today, in their various incarnations as free online flash games for kids, they are as enjoyable they ever were.

The controls of these online reincarnations are quite simple, and in adapting them for computer keyboards, there are lots of options for where the directional controls and fire buttons can be laid out. Often, the directional controls use the arrow keys, or the numerical keypad, while enter, control, or space serves as the action button.

In some cases, the mouse becomes a substitute for both the directional stick and the fire button, which some gamers may find very different from their original gaming experiences. For example, the arcade and Atari classic, Missile Command, where the player moves a cursor to a point on the screen where anti-ballistic missiles are aimed to explode in order to protect one’s homeland from nuclear devastation at the hands of incoming ICBMs, often uses the mouse as its game controller. In pre-computer versions of the game, you used a joystick to move the cursor. Though the challenge is similar, the feel of the game is markedly different when you use the mouse with one hand.

Nonetheless, the fun is preserved when you search for and find classic flash games online. Just like in the old days, you can jump a frog through traffic and across a river of logs, lily pads, snakes and alligators in Frogger, defend the Earth from a fleet of alien spacecraft in Space Invaders, and weave Pac Man through a maze and chomp on dots while fleeing pursuing ghosts. The simplicity of the games makes them well suited to rebirth online as a free flash kids game, though often with enhanced sounds and graphics. The fun of classic games is preserved online and enjoyable for free.

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