One of my favorite places to visit in New Hampshire is “Fun Spot” in Weir’s Beach. I only visit in the winter months, as the area is full of tourists during the summer months. Fun Spot is known for having the largest collection of working vintage video games. My husband and I enjoy reliving our teen years, replaying our favorite games. My husband even has his own blog “Retro Game Guy” that reflects his love of gaming.
I work in the field of aliens and UFOs, and so I noticed how many of the vintage games have aliens and space as a theme. I began to try to play ALL the games with an alien theme, and happily killed bad aliens for hours.
I was interested to note that these games were popular during the rise of alien abduction reports. They of course reflect interests in space and science fiction, but they also reflect the new interest in aliens as evil beings. Aliens were traditionally seen as beings come to warn us to take better care of our Earth. Most movies, not counting “War of the Worlds”, showed aliens are truly advanced beings trying to help the inferior Earthlings that still had war and were ruining their environment.
Betty and Barney Hill (or rather the TV movie based on the book about their supposed experience) turned aliens from friendly watchers concerned with our well being, to beings out to probe and hurt us. These games reflect this. Plus what fun would a video game be without evil aliens to kill? We all know what happened to the video game based on the movie ET. So bad that unsold copies were buried in the desert.
Let’s not forget the games that were based on movies. Unlike “ET” these games are actually pretty good. The Star Wars and Star Trek ones proved I’m not ready for space command yet. (The Star Trek one is supposed to be a “training simulator” so you don’t fell you have blown up the Enterprise! You just aren’t ready to join the crew yet.)
