The Merv Griffin Show
 

Dateline: sometime in, probably, 1975 or so.

I'm home from school because I have some light illness or something, and I'm watching The Merv Griffin Show. First they have on a celebrity of the time, someone on a current TV show. Then, for the second act, they bring out a guy who has invented an electronic game.

This game is a black box, about two feet wide and one foot high, with a console built into it with a bunch of knobs and dials and LED readouts. Looks all high-tech for its time.

I'm about 11, and I'm instantly fascinated. Because Atari has not really done its work yet, you see, and so the notion of electronic gaming is in its true infancy. Wow, I think, An electronic game being shown on TV! I've never seen that before! I better watch this because I may never see an electronic game on TV again!

The game is called "The Energy Game", or something. You turn the game on and it shows the passage of time in years. Energy resources are being used up, and you have to turn the knobs on the box to change usage. You could increase things like solar and geothermal and try to keep oil around.

At the time, there was this notion floating around that stuff was running out. Alarmists were saying there were 30 years left of oil, 50 years of natural gas, and 200 of coal at the current rate of consumption. At the same time, there was a notion that the alternative energy sources could replace the others. The Energy Game had you change the rate at which those things are used, so that you keep them around for the longest possible time. I don't remember any theoretical goal of, say, saving humanity or the world. (In the 70s, gameplay fun hadn't advanced to the point where an actual goal was required. Turning the knobs and watching the display was all we had, but we liked it.)

On The Merv Griffin Show, they had the celebrity try The Energy Game. I think he ran out of oil quickly (the frightening future world of 2003!) while the game designer stood behind him, trying to explain how he had to increase the 'renewable' knobs, and providing an alarming view of what would happen to the world if the celebrity were in fact in charge of knob-twiddling.

28 years later, it's obvious that we were never in danger of running out of these things; economics, innovation, and productivity have twiddled the knobs where no single person ever could. The celebrity turned out to be unmemorable; ditto the game designer. But Merv himself? Not only was he the host, but also a producer; and then he owned production companies; and then he branched out into casinos and then hotels. He is rich beyond our notions of what rich is. So,

Lessons Learned By Watching The Merv Griffin Show and then living 28 years:

1. Do not listen to celebrities.
2. Do not listen to game designers.
3. Do not listen to alarmists.
4. Listen to Merv Griffin.

Re: The Merv Griffin Show
 

The first single-player mass-market game I can think of that had an actual "you win" ending was Adventure, for the Atari 2600 (released in 1980). Everything else were either sports games (which had timers), competitive games (Space War, Combat, Air-Sea Battle, etc. with a winner and a loser) or play-endlessly-until-you-lose games (Space Invaders, Breakout).

Games with "winning" goals were rare until later in the 80's. In general, if you were good enough at many games, you could play forever or until a variable overflow caused a crash. Pitfall! comes to mind as an early-80's game with very-well-designed goals -- it had both a final "winning" goal (collecting all 32 treasures), a score by which to measure your progress towards that goal (so it wasn't a simple win/lose binary), limited lives AND a timer.

But had awareness of the problem not been increased by the environmental Chicken Littles, would there have been as much R&D and effort poured into said innovation and productivity, and might we be worse off for it today? (That's not to say that we'd be bone-dry on oil today, but as the Jewish mother said of chicken soup, "Environmental warnings may not help, but they can't hoit.")

Watching advances in food production, fossil fuel production/management, etc. is sort of like watching Moore's Law in action. I marvel at the ingenuity involved and how technology keeps striding forwards, but a little voice at the back of my head keeps mumbling "But that can't keep up forever, can it?"

I used to kick ass at Adventure...all 3 levels.

I figured out E.T., but I never could figure out Raiders of the Lost Ark. Damn, that game seemed incredibly mind-boggling in 1984 (age 8).

I went to a taping of the Merv Griffin show in 1974. Didn't see any black boxes on it, but I did see Art Linkletter. I sat next to a statuesque California exotic blonde who kept shoving my foot off of my knee every time I put it up there to attain a comfortable seated position. Near as I can figure, she didn't care for my Vasque hiking boots being in the same potential audience shot with her gams.

California was a weird place for a Midwestern boy.

California is a weird place for anybody ...

In 1984, I was 16 yrs. old, and it would never suprise me if no one at any age could ever figure "raiders" out. I remember running from the 'tsetse' flies with what little remained of my duct taped joystick just shortly before meeting it's ultimate fate against the bedroom wall and it then did lay to rest in pieces all across the floor. I never could figure that one out either, it did seem pretty darn unbeatable.

Duh. "Welcome to the land of fruits and nuts."

You forgot "flakes" ... gotta make the granola (state) complete, you know.