Stories:Vygis And Video Games

Author: C3PO. Like most people of our generation, Video Games were a part of Vygis' life. From the early arcade days to the high-powered console games, here are a few stories about some of the games that Vygis adopted through the years.
== 1980's: Tempest ==
When I met Vygis in 1982, some lucky kids had home consoles like the Atari 2600, the rest of us took our quarters to the corner arcade. When we began going on cross-country trips with the Explorers, the highlights of those trips were the stops where they had some interesting arcade or at least a couple of games that would take our money. Everybody is an aficionado, and the arcade game that Vygis most looked forward to playing was Tempest. It was undeniably cool, with *multicolor* vector graphics, rich sound, that awesome free-spinning control wheel, and pandemonium on screen. I, Vygis, and Tom Welsh, the Toshiba Brother in Explorer Post 1275 all nerdily sported hand-crafted T-shirts declaring our love for this game. I don't have a photo of Vygis' shirt, but here are two of the three of us wearing ours from around that time:
Toshiba bros 001.jpg|Tom Welsh
Toshiba bros 002.jpg|Vygis Campe
Toshiba bros 003.jpg|Charles Dickson
I think that at one point we got a chance to play the tabletop version of the arcade game, on one of the Explorer trips. Eventually, the arcades began dying out, and the original generation of sort-of space themed games were replaced by Street Fighter and other boring games. However, on one of our trips out west, it might have been the first one, I commandeered the agenda and steered us through St. Louis where a video game museum was rumored to exist. It did, and there they had it, Tempest. Not just any Tempest either, one of the mythological modded consoles with some feature I'm afraid I don't remember exactly what it was, probably the invisible level or something like that. I think the museum was the National Coin Op and Video Game Museum, which according to this memorial page closed soon after: 
http://www.coinop.org/features/coinopmuseum/
Later in life, Vygis and I tried playing various adaptions of the game for P.C. but it wasn't quite the same without the free-spining, weighted optical knob that no game since has ever had.
== 1990's Concord House Games ==
Hanging out in his apartment, Vygis often whiled away time playing games on his Win95 PC. Among the games he often talked about were Command and Conquer, and Sim City. These had building and strategy in common. 
Per Brian Goldberg on Facebook: "Hi Charles, Vygis was into Command and Conquer. He played the sh*t out of that game in the mid 90's. I am willing to bet that is what you are thinking of. Also, he loved mario bros. he had it hooked up to the tv in the columbia apt. and I would sometimes play. he also used to play the mario bros. songs on the piano."
He also had a variety of consoles at his apartment, from a Nintendo to eventually an Xbox. The Xbox was the console that pretty much reinvented console playing, with lots of networking features and big titles like Halo.
== 2000's Lan Parties ==
As console technology advanced and encouraged networking, a new generation of video games encouraged social gathering to hook consoles together and play in multiplayer worlds. A couple of stories of this kind of game play have been posted by some of Vygis' friends.
On March 22, 2013, Matt Hamilton wrote in Vygis' memorial Facebook group:
:"I was lucky enough to spend yearly visits with Vygis when he came to see his cousins. He made an annual trip to Connecticut, and after visiting we all would play video games. This picture is a layout of one of our LAN parties, Vygis was "XBOX echo". His "TV" was actually a huge projector. I'm posting this because I miss him. Thanks to the folks who put this group together. Rest in peace Vygis."
Vygis played a lot of LAN parties with Mark and Betsy, who write:
:"Playing over the interwebs is ok an all but there's something special about getting a dozen folks and stringing up computers all over the house. Playing too many games, eating junk food, hootin' and hollerin', and of course, endless tripping over cables. Man I miss Carmageddon right now hehe (kids, search the youtubes for 'carmageddon rolling demo'. You're welcome)." -- Mark Forster, March 27, 2013 on Facebook
:"Mark and I loved playing Battlefield 1942 with Vygis at our apartment. It's funny how we -er, I mean, they- didn't mind hauling those heavy monitors and CPUs around a bit." -- Betsy Burke
:"We often did LAN parties. Carmageddon, Battlefield 1942. UnrealTournament were in heavy rotation. Occasionally tried things like Jedi Knight, Star Wars flight sims. 
He tried to get me into Earth 2150, a simcity-like builder game. Where he failed to get me into that, Betsy and I failed to get him into World of Warcraft." -- Mark Forster, December 15, 2015
Category:Stories
Category:Interests:Video Games:Tempest
Category:Interests:Video Games:Halo
Category:Interests:Video Games:Command And Conquer
Category:People:Betsy Burke
Category:People:Mark Forster
Category:People:Matt Hamilton