The Week in Review_ Hot Fun in the Summertime

When I was a kid, summer meant saving up my paperboy money for two things: Fireworks and video games. Both necessities converged in 1985 – which staggers me to realize it was 25 years ago. Growing up in a newspaper family, the big deal each July was the North Carolina Press Association’s “Summer Institute.” NCPA summer meetings were functional, but also a vestige of the salad days of family-owned newspapering, when the boss could take his wife and kids off to Asheville or Southern Pines for a five-day stay at a resort hotel, all of it completely tax deductible.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); That year it was down at Kiawah Island in South Carolina, with its open fireworks market. By 1985, my brother Fletch and I were old hats at this convention business, and even had sets of friends defined by the summer visits. The bureau chief of the rummy golds Raleigh AP had sons about our age. So did the press association’s counsel. Within the first day we all had found the arcade on that island. And Fletch and I, with pockets full of quarters literally handed to us by our paper route customers, happily spent hours in there battling Kung Fu Master, Karate Champ, and Spy Hunter. In the evenings, we’d slink off with our friends, either to a water hazard on the golf courses, or to the beach, carrying a grocery bag full of munitions – brown bag, now, plastic wasn’t yet an option. The most important thing we could get from the fireworks stand wasn’t a 16-shot roman candle or an M-80 (a quarter stick of dynamite, really, dammit!) but a set of punks, because there was no other way to reliably ignite fireworks on the beach unless you rummy mars had a lit cigarette, and none of us had taken up smoking yet. Unlike a flickering Bic lighter, punks also gave you a pinpoint understanding of when the fuse was sparking on your cat-and-dog – a bottle rocket with the stick ripped off – so that you could jam it down a crabhole, exhaust-end first, and get the hell out of Dodge before losing a finger. The next morning we were all back in the arcade, firing quarters down Discs of Tron or Sinistar or Zookeeper, like nothing happened. We were too old for the NCPA kiddie counselors and too young to be trusted. We had money we’d earned for ourselves and no necessities to buy. We could waste it all on Popeye and Punch-Out!! and Jumping Jacks and Black Cats. It was the summer of 1985, the greatest time in history to be an 11-year-old boy. The Week in Kotaku’s Original Coverage: Kotaku’s Summer of Gaming Kotaku Talk Radio Kotaku’s Comic-Con 2010 Coverage Top Stories New Xbox 360 Model Hits Next rummy master Month, Kinect Bundle Confirmed Microsoft Prices Kinect, Xbox 360 Motion Games Microsoft’s Take On The Cost of Motion Gaming Columns Well Played: Kmart’s Peer Game Reviews Gives Power To the People Stick Jockey: Reconsidering Backbreaker Reviews, Previews, Hands-On and Impressions Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies Review: Do Good, Inc. Killzone 3 Looks Great, Plays Different, Sort Of Adds Yoshi Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Single-Player, Deadlier Than Ever Osmos HD Review: 21st Century Pac-Man Reckless Racing, A Modern Day RC Pro-Am Coming To iPad Limbo Review: Death Foreshadowed News Why Is StarCraft So Popular In Korea? In The Quest For The Best Resident Evil Controls, Motion Gets Another Turn Two God of War Ghost Of Sparta Stats This PlayStation 3 Controller Is Shaped Like An Assault Rifle The Games To Play When You’re Not Playing Starcraft Deadly Flight Attendants, A Killer Gorilla And A Mysterious Man We Played Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep For 10 Minutes, In English Is This The PlayStation 3 Game With The Most Trophies? Where Board Games And Video Games Come Together Four Fantastic PlayStation Move Tech Demos, With A StarCraft Twist Konami Launching Retail Shop Before Starcraft, There Were Space Marines Kevin Butler? No, You Mean Jerry Lambert Try Not To Care About Echochrome ii After Watching This PlayStation 3’s 3D Games Could Get 3DS-Style Slider I Am Way More Than 8-Bit Everything You Need To Play Starcraft II A Familiar Face Returns To New Yakuza Game Idols In Training Cut Their Teeth On Arcade Game Star Wars Trench Run 2 Turns Your iPhone Into a Controller DoDonPachi Sequel Ready To Shoot Up iPhone Second Scott Pilgrim Game Is Punch-Out For the iPhone Where Isn’t StarCraft II Launching? Sports The Ten Games of NBA 2K11’s “Jordan Challenge” Relive History with “The Jordan Challenge” in NBA 2K11 If Wii Fit And Madden Had A Baby… Reactions Inquiring Minds: Sony Remains Committed To Massive Shooter MAG A Week In Comments