My version is going to be a little different. The four "faces" would be:
An Upright Arcade Cabinet
My younger days (mostly the early 80's) were spent doing the roll-of-quarters/pocketful-of-tokens thing. There were actual arcades I would go to (with friends, even!): Alligator Alley, Space Station, and a few more. Super Cobra, Zaxxon, Lock-n-Chase, Battlezone, Hard Drivin', and many others, but the cabinet that appears on the mountainside to represent the arcade period of my life is
Crazy Climber, a video game apparently based on a Harold Lloyd film, and it is
the Nichibutsu version, not the Taito one. The joysticks on the N version were closer together than the T version, making it easier for me to play.
A Gaming Console
I was a latchkey kid for a while. The lady down the street who ran a daycare out of her home for folks like me had an Atari 2600 that was always in demand. Later, my cousin got himself an Intellivision. My dad got himself an NES and Cranky (who has been one of my dad's friends for just about forever) got a Magnavox Odyssey. Then there was college [PAUSE || ]. After college, we would hang out at a coworker's house where they had a SNES for hours and hours (and hours) of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Cranky upgraded to a PS1. I married into an N64 and finally got to play that pre-censorship version of
Ocarina of Time I got when Blockbuster went out of business. I even stepped up to a PS2 later and finally got to play the Shadow of the Colossus disc I'd been holding onto forever. But the console I would put on the mountain would be an
Intellivision II. In middle school, I won $100 in a radio call-in contest (remember them?). After claiming it, I immediately rode my bike to the nearest Toys-Я-Us and bought one, along with a
Treasure of Tarmin cartridge. I then proceeded to play it in the living room on a small B&W television I had pulled from someone's curb*, but I played it with me, the console, and the TV all under a blanket, because I didn't want my mother to know I'd blown my prize money on a video game system. Ah, to be young again.
A Gaming PC
I built my first PC (for myself, that is) in 2000, a VIA MVP3.5**-based Super Socket 7 machine running Win98SE with 512MB RAM, a SBLive! 4.1 sound card, and an AGP 2x TNT2 Ultra GPU. It started out with a P233MMX, but in its final form it is running a 600MHz K6-III+ with a Voodoo3 2000 PCI card as a secondary GPU. I say
is running because it is still very much working (even though these days it doesn't get out of the "garage" much). That machine took me through Diablo I & II, FF7, Warcraft I & II, Starcraft, Age of Empires I & II, Black & White, Bards' Tale I, II, & III, Masters of Orion I & II, Dune II, Myst & Riven, and who knows how many other games that I can't remember right now. The image on the mountain is that of
a more or less generic tower PC with a DVD drive, a CD-RW drive, and both 5-1/4 and 3-1/2 floppies. But NO RGB ANYTHING because ... just no.
A Deck of Cards
I learned to play cards at a
very early age. My mother taught me War, Concentration, and Crazy Eights long before I even knew what "Uno" was. In high school, my father taught me Pinochle, and then Double-Deck Pinochle, and later Canasta and
Oh Hell. We tried Whist, but it never really caught on. Even later, we combined DDPinochle and Oh Hell into a game we called "Oh Pinochle," which follows many of the rules of both and can result in much hilarity (and sorrow). College, of course, taught me Euchre (including a 2-person variant). I would also learn multiple varieties of Patience (i.e., "Solitaire"), including Klondike (the "traditional" version most people know) and my personal favorite, Napoleon at St Helena. I didn't discover FreeCell until much, much later, but it never really grabbed me. There is also a deceptively simple form (whose name I don't know) where you just pick up a full deck of cards and call out any value to start (e.g., "Jack!") as you turn over the top card, and then proceed through the deck turning over cards one at a time as you call out each subsequent card (i.e., "Queen!" "King!" "Ace!" "Two!" and so on), and in order to "win," you must make it through the entire deck WITHOUT calling out a value matching the one you turn over (suit doesn't matter). It
sounds easy, but trust me, it is not. The image on the mountain is the back of
a squared off deck of cards with the JQ pair face-up in a V kind of overlapping the deck's NE corner.
--Patrick
*And let me tell you, playing a game where item power is denoted by color on a B&W television adds an extra layer of challenge to the whole thing.
**MVP3 northbridge, but 686B southbridge (instead of the usual 586A/B) which allowed ATA/100 instead of the slower ATA/66 or ATA/33.