Child's Play

Your average gamer these days is in his late 20s—young enough to still find new ways to destroy brain cells, old enough to worry about bills and 401ks, and wise enough to reminisce about the good ol' days of videogames. But was the age of Pong, Atari, Mattel handheld football, and Donkey Kong really all that great, or are we just blinded by fuzzy, warm nostalgia?

That's the question we asked—and answered—back in the November [2003] issue of EGM, in which we rounded up nine children of the PlayStation generation—ages 9 to 12—and forced them to play a variety of titles from the late'70s to the mid-'80s.