I’ve been asking this question since the early 2000s, and I don’t know for the life of me why I didn’t bother looking the answer up with Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to ruin the mystery. It turns out, however, that the disappearance of Strategic Simulations Inc. is not a mystery after all.
Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of …read more

And, yes, I owe Aiza over at Gamerlite, one of b5media Video Games Channel’s newest blogs, an apology for not “promoting camaraderie” by answering her tag at the soonest possible time. Well, Aiza, blame it on Bayantel (whose service, sad to say, began to suck deteriorate [again] after my supposed speed and bandwidth upgrade—surprise!) and sleepless nights courtesy of leveling multiple characters on Level Up! Games‘ Perfect World and playing different video games on my Atari 2600 and Nintendo Family Computer.
Anyway, without further ado, I present to you dear readers my answers to Aiza’s meme:

Darn. Sorry, folks, it just hit me like insects smashing into windshields in the dead of the night.
Back in the 80s, when Atari was still the in thing, I remember getting my grubby hands on the controls of Mattel’s Intellivision at the house of a family friend.
Boy, they weren’t kidding when they dubbed the machine “intelligent television.” It took me an entire day just to figure out how to operate the whacked out controller, which consists of a keypad and dial. And that’s just learning how the darn thing operated. Mastery was a word I couldn’t connect to the machine …read more