Ten years ago, when it seemed like every time I turned on the air-conditioner or sat down to play a video game I had the distinct pleasure of hearing how back in the good old days kids sweated and played outside, I made a promise that I would never tell my children how it was “back in my day” in the unlikely event that I had children to tell that to.

This is a hard promise to keep when you’re into the video game scene.

I went on a game-buying blitz a couple of weekends ago. I racked up some fifty games. Yes, fifty games. Capcom Classics Collection offered 22 different titles, Midway Arcade Treasures has a line-up of 24 games, and the DOOM Collector’s Edition (DOOM still being in my opinion, the greatest PC game ever made) had all three of the old-school DOOM titles. And I also bought Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, which is quite possibly one of the most fun party games ever.

What was the first thing I did when I got home? I called my little brother into my room and asked him if he wanted to go a round or two of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting. “This is old-school!” I said. “This is what I played when I was your age.” What followed was stories of quarters lost and reputations ruined at the skating rink, followed by a brief reminiscence of the one time I—a lowly middle-schooler—held at bay at least three high-school students at the Mortal Kombat II machine in the mall’s arcade (when the mall had an arcade).

After taking a beating at the hands of Ken (he picked E. Honda just because he looked funny), the young one wanted another crack at it. After narrowly beating my Zangief with Dhalism, the little guy was hooked.

That’s when I realized that gamers had a golden opportunity to expose a younger generation to some true gaming classics, and that modern gaming technology is making this possible.

Movie buffs have no problem showing their kids classic films: all but a few films with an extremely narrow audience are available on VHS or DVD. So when you want your kid to see Casablanca or the original King Kong, you buy or rent the film in question and pop some popcorn. As long as you have some kind of hardware that plays a disc or tape—no matter what brand that machine is—you’re set.

However, with gamers who want to walk down memory lane or show their kids that there was a world before Halo, things are a tad more difficult. Frogger for the Atari 2600 is indeed a classic, but just recently (I dare say as recent as five to ten years ago) you needed a functioning Atari 2600 and a functioning Frogger cartridge to play it. And these two things are both rarer than a steak cooked the way I like it.

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