As a 13-year-old at the time, it was depressing. The consoles and console games of the late 70s/early 80s seemed to have plateaued, and the PC-like systems that

As a 13-year-old at the time, it was depressing. The consoles and console games of the late 70s/early 80s seemed to have plateaued, and the PC-like systems that were heralded as replacements were expensive and didn't really have many good games. At home, I had a Colecovision console whose most impressive game was a 3D platformer, Zaxxon. The rest of the Colecovision catalogue was lame. I also had a Vic 20 which didn't have any real games of note (although it was interesting if somewhat frustrating to type in some BASIC games from magazines). I had access to Apple II+ and IIe machines at school and a neighbor had an Atari 800. Choplifter was probably the most impressive thing on either one. I remember a lot of people being really disappointed by the Atari 800 as it was made by a gaming company yet didn't have anything that was really that fun. (This was, incidentally, the same time that text adventures were getting a shot in the arm with Zork and the follow-up games, but that was different than the action games teens like me craved) At that point I kind of dropped away from gaming and got into music in a big way. The NES didn't gain traction until I was in college in the late 80s, and by that point I was more interested in some of the arcade games that were popping up in the basement of the student union.