If there is a more useless thing to brag about than being good at one particular video game, I don't know what it is.

Unless, of course, you're 13.

When I was 13, there were no such things as video games. We did have pinball machines, which had been around in bars and stores since the 1930s, but the idea of being able to do anything with a TV screen other than turn it on and watch a show would have seemed like science fiction to us. That's why -- in spite of how simplistic it seems -- when Pong first came out in 1972, it was a huge sensation. I swear that sometimes we spent hours just making that little dot on the screen go back and forth.

Once the real games started coming out -- Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaxian and finally Pac-Man in 1980 -- video gaming sort of slipped out into the mainstream culture, and all of a sudden businesses known as video game arcades started springing up. When I was working for the paper in Gastonia, N.C., in 1982, someone opened an arcade right next door to our office.

I remember playing a lot of Donkey Kong that year -- I was 32, but it was a highly arrested-development 32 -- although I never got to the point where I "won" the game. I would rack up a score of 50,000 on a game and then see that the high score was something like 5 million. There was only one game in which I ever "finished," and even that wasn't really the end.

[caption id="attachment_1642" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="Scramble"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/scramble.gif"><img class="size-full wp-image-1642" title="scramble" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/scramble.gif" alt="" width="224" height="251" /></a>[/caption]

I don't know what it was that fascinated me so much about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_(video_game)">Scramble</a>. I wasn't all that big on space games or even shooting games, but the idea of piloting this little rocket ship through six levels and destroying the enemy base at the end managed to hold my interest for the better part of a year.

Hey, there was nothing good on TV that year.

I didn't realize at the time that Scramble was a milestone game in a couple of ways. It was the first-ever game that scrolled horizontally as the rocket moved across the landscape, and it was actually the game that settled several questions about intellectual property rights. In<em> Stern Electronics, Inc. v. Kaufman</em>, the court ruled that it was possible to copyright the sounds and images in a video game and not just the computer code used to write them.

I didn't care about any of that stuff. I just wanted to destroy the base. I improved my skills enough to get through five of the six levels most of the time, but the sixth level was sheer torture. You flew the rocket through empty skies, and it was very difficult to know when the base was coming. When it did, you had one chance to be absolutely perfect. If not, you missed it.

I don't remember exactly when I did it, but I do remember feeling roughly the same sense of accomplishment as when I graduated from high school.

Trust me, the metaphor is an apt one. I destroyed the base and thought I had won the game.

Nope. All that happened was the game sent me back to the beginning to do it all again with a slightly greater degree of difficulty.

I never played Scramble again.