Interesting Kong video. That game did seem like it took electronic gaming in a new direction, although I admit I wasn't watching the evolution very closely. I had seen it in an arcade, which was not my usual hangout type place, but people were stuffing money into it to play it.
I remember Pong (that ping/pong game) as the first electronic game I had seen. It was totally fascinating, but not for very long because it seemed like it only did one thing. The fascination was more about the technology than the actual game. Then came Kong, and a couple of others that just seemed like Kong all over again, and then Pac Man, and I quit watching what was going on.
By the time I bought my first PC (I had been using apple IIs for years), there was a demonstration disk included with my new Dell laptop. It was Combat Flight Simulator, and I tried the demonstration disk. Now I was truly impressed, so I ran out and bought the game. It involved taking off from one or two sites in England along with a small squadron, flying across the Channel and encountering German fighters and bombers. There were also several airports across the Channel that you would sometimes start a mission from. And one day, I decided to see if I could actually find my way from one airport to another. Everything about the flight was visual, so it was sort of like finding a needle in a haystack. But there was a lat/lon readout that you could get to show up on the screen. I'm not sure why it was there, because it had little to do with actual flying during WWII (I might be wrong about that), but I went to one airport and while sitting on the runway, I recorded lat/lon on a piece of paper. Then I booted myself up again to another airport. There was no map of the area in the game, so I didn't know if I was north, south, east, or west of the other airport, but I did have the coordinates which I could use to figure the general direction. As I got closer, I started flying along grid lines that I could imagine in my head, and eventually found the airport I was looking for.
That did it, I went out and bought Microsoft Flight Simulator with it's GPS, VOR, IFL, Charts, an array of planes ranging from Piper Cubs to 747s, and world wide coverage. Just one game, but I was obsessed with it for years. It took years just to figure it all out, and I'm not sure I've learned it all yet. Eventually, I started buying other games, which I enjoyed, but never got as addicted to as Flight Simulator.
Before I bought my first laptop, I asked a local guru guy what kind of computer I should get, and he asked me what I was going to use it for. I was befuddled and thought, "Jesus; What do you think? Computer shit of course!" Then he pressed me further, and asked if I wanted to play games, and I said, "No," while thinking to myself, "Games??? Do you think I'm some kind of idiot? I'm going to use it to do computer shit!"
But, after I bought Flight Simulator, not knowing what a memory hog it was, I realized I had to buy a more powerful computer, so 3 months after I bought my laptop, I bought a desk top, which was only good enough until the next edition of FS came out. Then I had to get a better one just to keep up. Yee Gods!