My older brother is five years my senior, so by the time the NES came out, he was a teenager, and growing out of video games. While he did play Slalom and Castlevania a little, mostly that was it. But prior to that, he did play a lot of Atari games.
One of his favorites was Q-Bert, and I used to watch him play that. He was quite good. But he also very much liked Centipede, an insane game that, for me, was quite hypnotic to watch.
God knows the game probably has a story more complex, but basically you're fighting giant insects like the centipede (whicch split into smaller, faster parts as you shot it), a randomly jumping spider, and a others.
My brother played this one a lot, and I can still remember being in our family room in Wilmington, Delaware, as I watched him play. I was never good at it, and I've played it since, and am still not good at it. But it was very exciting to watch my brother do battle with it.
Atari games tend to get forgotten compared to the nostalgia of the NES days, but there was a whole other world before Nintendo. I remember it quite well.
I ... Never grew up.
Me neither!
I like the game in the arcades with the roller ball controller. Less so on consoles today, but I was forced to learn some strategy trying to get an achievement on Xbox last year. It was to clear the entire screen of mushrooms. It was really difficult and I didn't get it.
ah, I forget about those roller ball controllers. Boy, try explaining THAT to a kid these days.
I would say, imagine having that ball in the mouse, but huge.
Yeah but mice don’t have balls in them either anymore! 
Darn. I'm even out of date on my mouse. I still use a logitech mouse on my laptop I scavenged from my leftover tower computer I had over ten years ago.
Damn man! There’s a whole world of laser mice out there! 
I haven't bought a new computer since 2009. I wonder if I every will get another one. If my current laptop dies, I may be just get a keyboard for my phone and leave it at that.
I use my iPad for mostly everything now, but sometimes I do still need a computer to do some things.
For whatever reason Centipede is, in my mind, the quintessential pre-smartphone phone game. Nothing really worked well back then but Centipede fared alright.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that! I guess Centipede had a little more time in the spotlight!
Q*bert is awesome! Did you know there was a Q*bert cartoon on Saturday Supercade?
One of my dad's favorite arcade games back then was Centipede. When we'd go to arcades as a family, I'd run for the Pac-Man machine (of course), my mom would hop to Frogger, and my dad would make a beeline for Centipede.
Ha ha, Frogger is pretty good too!